Advertising has evolved significantly since its early days of social ads and pay-per-click. Current businesses face challenges with rising costs. REX, an AI-driven digital advertising platform, is on a mission to level the playing field and help e-commerce brands achieve scalable, cost-effective growth. Founded by Sean Gilfillan, Nikhil Vimal, and Anna Pfleghaar, REX was born from a fundamental realization: startups and small businesses cannot afford to allocate thousands of dollars per month to traditional ad agencies, let alone cover the additional costs of ad spend.
“Being a founder, you realize that every dollar matters. You can’t afford to pay an agency $5k-$10k/month just to be a client, never mind the ad spend,” said Sean Gilfillan, founder of REX. “The current business model needs to change so that your money goes towards growth via digital advertising.”
REX has already demonstrated strong traction. After completing Techstars AI in Chicago, the company executed 170 campaigns with a total ad spend of $10 million across more than 30 ad channels. “We achieved an average 9X return on ad spend, three times the e-commerce industry average,” Gilfillan stated. The results have been promising, with a 94% month-over-month retention rate and a waitlist of more than 10,000 businesses.
The digital advertising landscape is increasingly complex and costly. Mistakes in ad targeting, such as enabling certain audience network settings, can lead to up to 90% of ad spend being wasted on fraudulent impressions. “If you mess around and click on some audience network buttons, up to 90% of your ad spend can go to ad fraud, and you won’t even know it!” Gilfillan warned. Large enterprises and major ad agencies have long benefited from preferred vendor treatment, giving them an edge over small businesses. “You need to work with a partner who spends tens of millions on each ad platform so you get preferred vendor treatment, and the Googles, Metas, Amazons, etc. of the world pay attention to you,” he explained. This advantage has long benefited Fortune 500s and major ad agencies, who keep this knowledge to themselves while small businesses struggle and eventually give up.
One of the biggest pitfalls for businesses is failing to account for overhead and technology costs in their advertising strategy. “Some companies spend 90-100% on overhead and tech and 0-10% on digital advertising! Overhead and tech don’t lead to growth,” Gilfillan emphasized. “ONLY digital advertising helps grow your customer base and your revenue.” REX’s AI-driven automation tool is designed to be agnostic to specific martech and adtech solutions, ensuring brands focus on the one thing that matters: effective advertising execution.
AI is rapidly transforming the marketing landscape, but REX sees its biggest impact in paid distribution rather than creative production. While AI-generated content is improving, human creativity still holds a clear edge. “Content creation, data analytics, organic content distro across email, social, SMS—it’s all being commoditized at an exponential rate. What can’t be commoditized? The relationships with the ad platforms and the history of doing billions and billions in digital advertising,” Gilfillan explained. “You need those in order to have trust, and people just don’t trust ad agencies! The trust for the industry is barely above politicians.”
REX believes the future of digital marketing lies in vertical AI agents—intelligent systems that manage advertising strategy and execution without human intervention. “The future is vertical AI agents like REX, where AI handles everything from strategy to execution. Except creative. Creative is not there yet,” Gilfillan said. “We continue to see a major difference between human creative and AI creative, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
With momentum building, REX is gearing up for its next phase of growth. The company is currently raising its $1.5 million seed round. It is also onboarding its initial 170 clients to the platform and preparing for a public launch. As AI continues to reshape the advertising industry, REX is positioning itself at the forefront of this revolution. By democratizing access to advanced advertising strategies, the company aims to ensure that e-commerce brands of all sizes can compete and succeed in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
