Adtech vet Brian O'Kelley's startup is pivoting to AI agents and rebranding with a new name

Apostra cofounders Brian O'Kelley and Anne Coghlan Franco Vogt Pivot! Adtech veteran Brian O'Kelley's Scope3 startup is rebranding.

Apostra wants to become a leader in agentic AI advertising.

The startup acts as an "orchestration layer" connecting advertiser agents with publisher agents.

Adtech veteran Brian O'Kelley , once described as the "master of the hard pivot," is pushing the reset button again.

O'Kelley and his cofounder, Anne Coghlan, exclusively told CMO Insider that they are renaming their company from Scope3 to Apostra as they aim to make the startup a leader in agentic AI advertising.

They describe Apostra as a platform that connects advertisers' AI agents with AI agents representing media sellers, so that marketers don't have to build separate integrations with potentially thousands of publishers, platforms, and other media providers.

O'Kelley told CMO Insider that advertising has been constrained by a fragmented media infrastructure, manual processes, and a programmatic advertising landscape organized around real-time bidding but not optimized for the most highly valued ad placements.

"You can't buy anything that's not a rectangle with a cookie," O'Kelley said.

Apostra is designed to let AI agents handle the work of negotiating and managing ad campaigns across various publishers, including online placements, linear TV, and in-store audio, and to connect brands with creators and clippers.

The advertiser agent makes the media owner's agent aware of the marketer's goals, while the media owner's agent can bring forward details about the publisher's audience and potential ad opportunities.

Apostra uses AdCP, a protocol created last year by a consortium of adtech companies, including Scope3, that provides a common language for agents to interact.

Apostra said this makes it easier for marketers to place ads in channels such as "walled garden" social platforms , podcasts, or out-of-home advertising, which are traditionally harder to reach through programmatic ad buying.

Unlike traditional programmatic advertising , this doesn't involve software bidding on individual ad impressions in real time.

Instead, the agents can automate parts of the slower process of discovering, negotiating, approving, and executing media deals.