The global digital ad market is expected to reach $870.85 billion by 2027, with agencies managing a significant portion of this spending. However, many still rely on outdated financial processes, fragmented tools, and inefficient billing cycles that cost them time and money. Canadian startup Opal is bringing modern financial infrastructure to agencies, addressing this inefficiency by eliminating credit risk, automating financial workflows, and unlocking cashback opportunities on ad spend.
Growth plans
The SaaS platform designed to automate back-office operations for agencies has secured $1.5 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Founders Co-op with support from Exit North Ventures.
This investment will accelerate Opal’s mission and bring to market Opal Spend, the industry’s first purpose-built ad-spend solution that seamlessly integrates ad spend, accounting, and invoicing in one unified system. In addition to this, Opal plans to expand its capabilities, deepen platform integrations, and hire across engineering, product, and customer success teams.
Eyes to build a bank for agencies
Founded in 2024 by Alex Steele, a former agency owner who faced firsthand the financial struggles these companies deal with. Founded to solve billing headaches at his media buying agency, Easy Agency, Opal offers an all-in-one platform that replaces fragmented, horizontal tools. The company’s long-term vision is to become the premier financial partner for media and creative agencies, unifying spend management, invoicing, and data-driven optimisation for a frictionless back-office experience.
Since launching, the company has grown 400% and attracted top engineering talent, including a team of former X engineers. Since launching, Opal has attracted top engineering talent, including recruiting former X engineers. By automating tedious and repetitive workflows into a single platform, the company enables agencies to close deals faster and focus on creating value for clients.
This new approach addresses many shortcomings in existing ad spend solutions, such as disorganised account statements, lack of customer-segmented cards, and insufficient finance automation. By housing all these capabilities under one roof, agencies gain streamlined workflows that eliminate manual data entry, expedite invoicing, and simplify reporting—while also capturing cash-back rewards as a new profit source. Larger advertisers can take advantage of the same tools to retain budget ownership and maintain comprehensive visibility over their expenditures and campaign performance.
Unified ad-spend solution
Its purpose-built ad-spend solution Opal Spend eliminates the trade-off agencies face between earning cashback and managing credit risk by drawing funds directly from client accounts instead of extending credit. This allows agencies to benefit from cashback without financial exposure while also reducing overall financial risk. Additionally, the system automatically updates virtual card information across major advertising platforms, including Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and many more.
“Opal is building the Shopify for agencies. Just like Shopify provides the back-end of an ecommerce business, Opal provides the operating system for agencies. Having led an agency for years, we constantly juggled multiple back-office tools that don’t talk to each other, so half of our back-office work was copying the same data over and over into different horizontal tools,” said Alex Steele, Founder and CEO of Opal. “We built Opal to be a modern financial backbone for agencies—one that reduces friction from contract creation all the way through invoicing and payment. With the launch of Opal Spend, we are putting everything—contracts, invoicing, payments, attribution—under one umbrella, reducing friction, speeding up revenue, and delivering a clearer picture of performance. All an agency should worry about is getting customers and serving them well. Opal makes that a reality.”
“I’ve seen firsthand how Alex’s determination and technical talent have shaped Opal into a game-changing financial platform,” said Ian Crosby, Head of Accounting Products at Mercury. “It’s not just streamlining day-to-day finances—it’s redefining how agencies and brands manage ad spending, and I’m excited to support Opal’s growth.”
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