Marketbridge, a B2B marketing firm based in Bethesda, Maryland, has acquired Channel99, a San Francisco startup that measures how companies' digital advertising turns into sales opportunities. Marketbridge announced the deal on October 28, 2026.
Terms were not disclosed, AdExchanger reported. Channel99 will operate as "Channel99, a Marketbridge company" and keep its product name. Founder Chris Golec continues to lead it and reports directly to Marketbridge chief executive Bob Ray. Mark Yatman, Channel99's vice president of product and engineering, and his team join Marketbridge.
The two companies are launching a joint offering called AI Visibility, which measures how brands appear in answers from AI search tools and chatbots.
What Channel99 built
Golec founded Channel99 in 2022. He is best known as the founder and former chief executive of Demandbase, the company that helped popularise account-based marketing, in which B2B sellers target named companies rather than individual leads.
Channel99 sells a platform that links account-level digital marketing to opportunities and pipeline. It tracks ad exposure across platforms including LinkedIn and Microsoft, Google and Meta, using view-through measurement to connect impressions with later activity from the same accounts. AdExchanger described it as a specialised advertising and attribution business rather than a demand-side platform in the open-web programmatic sense.
More recently the company added analytics for AI search. According to Ray, it shows clients how their services rank in chatbot answers compared with competitors, and how their other paid media affects that performance. The next step, he told AdExchanger, is an attribution framework that measures how that visibility contributes to sales.
Channel99 launched in November 2022 with a $5 million seed round led by Jackson Square Ventures, with participation from Norwest Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and GTMfund, according to its launch announcement.
When it launched, Channel99 said nearly 50 customers were using a free mobile app it offered to show marketers where their ad budgets were going. Its website now carries a notice that Channel99 is part of Marketbridge.
“Channel99 helps clients identify what is happening and where opportunities exist. Marketbridge can then help them determine what to do about it, through our strategy, measurement, analytics, data, media, content, web, PR, and consulting capabilities.”
Why Marketbridge is buying
Marketbridge has spent the past few years assembling a group of marketing services businesses. Five firms, COMM, fama PR, Intelisent, MarketBridge and Quarry, merged under the Marketbridge name in September 2024, according to MrWeb, and the company says it now has more than 350 people across North America and Europe. AdExchanger said Channel99 is its first true technology business.
Ray presented the deal as a way to pair data with services. "Channel99 helps clients identify what is happening and where opportunities exist. Marketbridge can then help them determine what to do about it, through our strategy, measurement, analytics, data, media, content, web, PR, and consulting capabilities," he said in the release.
He told AdExchanger the combined business should be seen as a "next-gen integrated agency consulting company", and that Marketbridge coordinates its acquisitions rather than leaving each unit to run independently, as traditional agency holding companies do.
Ray also stressed the role of people in the combined company. "This is a people-based business," he told AdExchanger. He said independent technology companies such as Channel99 run into barriers to growth on their own, a view he and Golec reached after discussing their businesses.
Why Channel99 sold
Ray and Golec have known each other for years. They overlapped at DWA, an agency that Dentsu bought in 2017 as part of Merkle's B2B arm, and have already pitched enterprise clients and run events together, AdExchanger reported.
Golec said the alternative to a sale was hard growth on his own. He told AdExchanger he had been thinking: "God, how I need to get scale with the sales and marketing organization and go raise a bunch of money." Joining Marketbridge, he said, "gives us both speed in the marketplace."
"We are excited to join Marketbridge at a time of unprecedented technology innovation across the B2B marketing landscape," Golec said in the release.
