Opal, a 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 participation from Exit North Ventures. This investment will drive the development of “Opal Spend,” an innovative ad-spend platform designed to seamlessly integrate advertising expenses with accounting, invoicing, and contract management.
Revolutionizing Agency Back-Office Operations
Founded in 2024 by Alex Steele to address billing inefficiencies at his media buying agency, Easy Agency, Opal replaces fragmented, disjointed tools with an all-in-one platform. Since launching, the company has grown 400%, attracting top-tier engineering talent, including a team of former X engineers. By automating repetitive workflows into a unified system, Opal enables agencies to streamline operations, close deals faster, and focus on delivering value to clients.
Introducing “Opal Spend” – The First Integrated Ad-Spend Solution
With this investment, Opal is bringing “Opal Spend” to market—the first ad-spend management solution purpose-built for agencies. The platform eliminates the tradeoff between cashback rewards and credit risk by drawing funds directly from client accounts instead of extending credit. This allows agencies to earn cashback without financial exposure while reducing overall risk. Additionally, Opal Spend automatically updates virtual card information across major ad platforms, including Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and more.
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A Unified Financial Backbone for Agencies
“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.”
Addressing Industry Pain Points
Opal Spend tackles common challenges faced by agencies, such as disorganized account statements, lack of customer-segmented cards, and insufficient finance automation. By consolidating these capabilities, agencies benefit from streamlined workflows, automated data entry, expedited invoicing, and simplified reporting, all while generating cashback as an additional revenue stream. Larger advertisers can also leverage Opal Spend to retain budget control and gain real-time visibility into expenditures and campaign performance.
Backed by Industry Leaders
“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.”
Accelerating Growth and Innovation
With fresh funding, Opal plans to expand its platform capabilities, deepen integrations, and grow its engineering, product, and customer success teams. 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 optimization for a seamless back-office experience.
