If your dream is to have an advertising expert run your digital campaigns for you round the clock, constantly tweaking and improving them, then Glitch has the solution for you.
The Dublin-based tech start-up was cofounded by chief executive Aisling Browne and Kingsley Kelly, its chief technology officer, in 2023.
It has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that identifies what’s not working in your campaigns, fixes underperforming ads and automatically optimises your campaigns – daily.
“It’s like a 24/7, always-on AI that just watches your ad campaigns and makes sure everything runs smoothly,” explains Kingsley, who likens it to self-driving cars for advertisers.
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“You don’t have to move the steering wheel but at the same time, if you want to drive the car, you still can.”
Aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), as well as niche agencies, Glitch provides everything a business needs to scale Google Ads. All business users have to do – apart from pay the monthly subscription – is upload their website’s URL. From there Glitch will analyse the business and generate optimised campaigns.
It not only provides smart asset creation, generating headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, call-outs and structured snippets tailored to your funnel stages and audience intent. It also gives advanced keyword discovery using Google Ads Keyword Planner API, competitor analysis and historical performance data to find your most profitable keywords.
For Kelly, who studied philosophy, worked in journalism and ended up in Google as a software developer working on Google Ads, Glitch is the ultimate solution for businesses looking to optimise digital campaigns.
‘The approach we’re taking with our agents is that they all have their own specialisms and can work together to, essentially, operate like an agency’
The idea for it emerged from Founders, Dogpatch Labs’s talent accelerator in Dublin, which brings techies and domain experts together to found digital start-ups.
It was through Founders that he met his co-founder Aisling Browne. Together they spotted the opportunity for a tech company dedicated to using AI to simplify digital advertising for SMEs. That’s because they knew so many were already spending money on Google Ads, but unsure if it was working.
Browne was previously head of European partnerships at fintech unicorn Wayflyer, which provides finance for small businesses; and, as Kelly points out, it used Google Ads as one way to determine “if a small business was worth funding”.
Kelly himself had come from the channel partners side of Google, facilitating hundreds of thousands of companies into Google Ads, making theirs a match made in start-up heaven. Both understood just how few small businesses truly understand how Google Ads work.
“So you ended up in a situation where the long-term viability of businesses was based on a platform that, for most of them, was almost like a casino in terms of how well they would do,” says Kelly.
They joined forces just as ChatGPT launched and got to work developing what would become Glitch, with initial Founders funding of €100,000 followed by Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start-Up supports.
The platform, which is designed to help both lean marketing teams and agencies, simplifies the management of performance advertising and quickly won a diverse range of clients, including Squid Loyalty, Riley and Mango Media.
The pair focused on automating repetitive, data-heavy tasks and on giving B2B marketers the same performance edge as larger organisations with in-house specialists.
Early customers reported a fivefold increase in conversion rates, a 9 per cent lift in click-through rates and a 30 per cent reduction in cost per acquisition compared to previous set-ups. Many have achieved much more: “We’ve worked with some clients whose ads were quite bad, so we have seen some who have had 100 per cent improvements in the number of conversions and about 50 per cent reduction in CPA [cost per action],” he tells Winterlich.
By the end of 2025 the pair had raised €2 million in seed funding to support international expansion. Generative AI has very quickly changed search engine optimisation for digital marketers.
“Where AI has become great is that upper and middle funnel, the getting from, ‘I’ve heard of something’, to, ‘What am I actually going to buy’, is where it comes together on the consumer journey. It has taken up that middle funnel, of getting to a decision,” says Kelly.
Glitch is accelerating the adoption of AI in digital marketing. Though sector agnostic, it typically targets ad budgets of around €1 million a year, per agent.
‘People are amazing at putting themselves into the value chain. These industrial or big scientific revolutions are very hard to go through. But once you’re through you don’t really want to go back’
“The approach we’re taking with our agents is that they all have their own specialisms and can work together to, essentially, operate like an agency,” he says.
For advertising agencies it provides each of the agency’s clients with an agent. For larger brands with a suite of products, it offers different agents for different product lines. “The solution can scale to everyone, but right now we’re focused on those smaller businesses,” he says.
Glitch automates as much of the process as possible, but also brings in humans to set up or manage things as required.
For agency staff whose current job is to oversee digital campaigns, which solutions such as Glitch do better, and more cheaply, it is inevitable that jobs will go, both he and Winterlich agree.
On the plus side, history is replete with examples of roles that once were prevalent but which no longer exist, while new and previously unheard-of ones took their place.
“People are amazing at putting themselves into the value chain,” says Kelly, who likens AI to those who might have feared electrification in the past. “These industrial or big scientific revolutions are very hard to go through. But once you’re through you don’t really want to go back. Just go all in on it, because the faster you move, the faster you’ll get through.”
