CloudX – a startup co-founded by the guys who co-founded MoPub and MAX – is using LLMs agents, “intelligent monetization” and a trusted execution environment to make the mobile ad stack behave more like programmable infrastructure than another AI-powered SSP.
That’s a lot of zeitgeisty buzzwords all at once.
Here’s the jargon-free condensed version: CloudX CEO and Co-Founder Jim Payne wants to take the pain (sorry, had to) out of mobile ad monetization and automate a lot of the tedious busywork that usually falls to engineers and ad ops.
CloudX, which launched into general availability on Wednesday, had been in beta for most of Q4 with a small group of mobile publishers that were willing to let agents handle the grunt work of setting up and maintaining their stacks.
“There’s a limit to what a single ad monetization person can do, just from a tactical perspective,” Payne said. “That’s where our notion of ‘intelligent monetization’ comes from.”
MoPub 2.0
MoPub – which Payne co-founded in 2010 and later sold to Twitter before the business was acquired by AppLovin and shut down in 2022 – was a mobile ad exchange and mediation platform that let app publishers tap into programmatic demand and manage their own in-app inventory.
Think of CloudX as MoPub’s spiritual successor.
The basic goal is similar, which is to help app publishers make money from their inventory, but the underlying approach has been updated for a more agentic way of running the stack. Rather than just automating the auction, the idea here is to use agents to tweak floors, line items and demand paths based on real-time performance data.
Agents can bridge the gap between a high-level strategy and the day-to-day mechanics of implementing a monetization regime, Payne said.
“We now have something that can keep up with the throughput of programmatic advertising – you know, billions of impressions a day – and still be smart at that scale,” he said. “That’s where we see the opportunity.”
Cloud control
In a typical setup, someone – usually an ad ops person – has to create and update line items, map IDs back and forth between networks, set floors and keep revising those settings in a dashboard.
Payne’s pitch is that publishers can define a high-level strategy for how they want to monetize, and then agents can handle much of that configuration and make ongoing adjustments in the background.
For example, CloudX has an agent for handling SDK integrations, another for setting up and testing ad formats, one for creating line items on the server and an orchestration agent “to make sure all the work is done properly,” Payne said.
Publishers can also add CloudX into their existing stack, he said, so they’re able to continue honoring previous arrangements while using CloudX to take care of additional demand and configuration work.
“That’s the thing we’re getting the most excited reception about from publishers,” Payne said, “that they don’t have to go back into the past where they were spending eight or even 10 hours a day operating the MoPub tool, pasting things in, getting it wrong and leaving revenue on the table because these errors would just go unnoticed.”
Trust, but verify
But CloudX is also trying to address a more elemental question, which is whether buyers can trust the auctions they’re bidding into.
According to Payne, many buyers are wary of exchanges that sit too close to a publisher’s own stack because of concerns about signal leakage and how publishers might use information about losing bids. A losing bid can offer clues about a buyer’s bidding strategy and reveal how much they’re willing to pay for certain users and impressions.
This arrangement creates “a trust issue,” Payne said.
CloudX runs its auctions inside of a trusted execution environment (TEE), which is the secure area of a main processor where code can run safely and in isolation. Inside the TEE, buyers can inspect the auction code and set rules for how to handle bids and signals, while publishers get dynamic price floors, log-level access and real-time analytics.
“It’s designed to bring in incremental programmatic demand in a way that’s safe,” Payne said. “We can guarantee cryptographically that there’s no signal loss and no games being played, [which] can be verified by the buyer at any time.”
Those sensitivities aren’t theoretical. Meta, for example – one of CloudX’s launch partners alongside Liftoff and Magnite – raised its concerns early on, back when CloudX was still just a product concept. They came up with the idea together of using a TEE.
Once that system was in place, Meta felt comfortable enough to join the CloudX marketplace, and Payne said he expects other large buyers to follow suit. CloudX also recently added InMobi, Mintegral, Moloco and Unity to its partner roster.
For Payne, CloudX, which raised a $30 million Series A in November and has a team of roughly two dozen people, is a reentry of sorts into ad tech.
After MoPub, he stepped away from the space for a while, investing and watching from the sidelines as programmatic matured. “I sort of hung it up for a second,” he said. But the rapid progress in AI pulled him back in.
It felt strange sitting on the sidelines as an observer while AI reshaped the industry, he said.
“If you’re a computer scientist,” Payne said, quoting Google’s Sergey Brin, “and you’re not involved in AI, what are you doing right now?”
