A Seattle-based customer engagement company, Ambassador, has completed the acquisition of Humming’s operating assets, a Tacoma programmatic advertising platform. This transaction represents part of Ambassador’s broader consolidation strategy as the company anticipates increased market turbulence among startups while major AI platforms continue expanding their feature sets.

The acquisition brings Humming’s automated digital advertising buying and placement technology into Ambassador’s ecosystem. Ambassador’s platform leverages artificial intelligence to handle customer referrals, manage loyalty initiatives, process surveys, and analyze various forms of customer feedback. According to Ambassador, incorporating Humming’s capabilities will strengthen its attribution features, enabling better tracking of how advertising expenditures translate into purchases, leads, and additional customer behaviors.

This marks another chapter in Ambassador’s acquisition history. The Seattle-based firm, which employs 22 people and has secured
approximately $11 million in funding, has been actively pursuing strategic purchases.

Ambassador’s CEO, Geoff McDonald, anticipates additional acquisition opportunities emerging as AI startups that essentially created interfaces for large language models face challenges retaining their customer base. This difficulty intensifies as companies like Anthropic and OpenAI incorporate comparable functionalities directly into their platforms.

McDonald believes successful companies will be those with extensive proprietary customer information accumulated over years—data that cannot be rapidly replicated. He refers to this as the context layer. Ambassador has been gathering such data since before the current AI boom, supplemented by its 2021 purchase of a referral marketing platform from an Apollo Global Management subsidiary. The company has subsequently redesigned its platform with AI at its core.

McDonald notes that customers of newer AI startups increasingly opt to develop solutions internally, particularly when major AI platforms release similar tools. He views this trend as highlighting
Ambassador’s competitive advantage through its proprietary data.

The Humming transaction, completed last week as an asset purchase, involved undisclosed financial terms. Humming, established in 2018, developed a platform for purchasing and managing advertising campaigns across websites, applications, and streaming platforms.

Co-founded by Bill Herling and Jill Nealey-Moore, a University of Puget Sound psychology professor, the Tacoma company raised over $5 million. At its height, Humming employed more than 30 people. Herling departed as CEO in 2023 and has since established Atrium, a new advertising technology venture focused on television advertising. He will not be joining Ambassador, and Humming’s independent product will be discontinued.

Ambassador plans to integrate Humming’s technology within 60 days, an expedited schedule that McDonald credits to Ambassador’s utilization of AI in its engineering workflows. Chief Operating Officer Mark Steffler reports the team has been releasing new features biweekly, attributing this pace to AI coding tools.

Ambassador has also transformed its business approach, moving away from conventional software subscriptions toward what McDonald terms “Results as a Service,” or RaaS. This model charges customers using consumption credits linked to outcomes rather than fixed fees for user seats or contacts. The system is structured so customers pay proportionally to the value delivered. McDonald intends to apply this pricing framework to Humming’s programmatic advertising capabilities, which he characterizes as unprecedented in the industry.

John Larson, Ambassador’s chief strategy officer and co-founder, previously co-founded Zipwhip, a Seattle business texting startup that Twilio purchased for $850 million in 2021. Following three years at Twilio post-acquisition, Larson joined Ambassador full-time in mid-2024. He participated in a $7 million funding round in December that included other former Zipwhip executives, describing Ambassador as his largest personal investment.

Larson expressed this week that current market conditions will likely create additional acquisition targets. While the failure rate among AI startups may not be as severe as media reports suggest, many companies with capable teams and solid technology simply cannot secure funding.

Prior to Humming, Ambassador acquired Predictive Solutions, a Seattle customer data platform, and ChalkLabs, a Spokane semantic search startup, before purchasing the Ambassador referral marketing platform from Intrado, an Apollo Global Management subsidiary, in 2021.

McDonald, who previously co-founded Element Data, a Seattle decision intelligence platform, launched the company as i2H in 2019. The holding company adopted the Ambassador name following the acquisition from the Apollo Global subsidiary.

Ambassador reports working with over 200 companies, with listed customers including Visible by Verizon, Canadian bank CIBC, and HR software company Rippling. Its customer base primarily spans telecommunications, financial services, and B2B software sectors.

The privately held company is nearing cash-flow neutrality, according to McDonald, setting it apart from many startups consuming their funding during growth phases.