In the past year, Vaudit claims to have uncovered overcharges of up to 30% on digital ad campaigns. In an industry where U.S. ad fraud losses exceeded $28 billion last year, the San Francisco-based startup says that detailed billing audits will be a central pillar of digital media accountability.
Founded by Michael Hahn, Vaudit, recently rebranded from BlokID, raised a $7.3 million seed round led by Mucker Capital, with participation from AVV, AppWorks, Plug and Play, and Kyber Knight. The startup now supports more than 1,000 customers globally, including enterprise accounts like HP, Panasonic, and Volkswagen, and says it is currently auditing over $150 million in annualized digital ad spend.
Shifting Focus from Traffic Quality to Billing Accuracy
Hahn, an adtech veteran, launched the company to address what he viewed as a blind spot in the advertising industry: actual billing. “The online advertising industry has normalized waste and fraud for far too long, with clicks that don’t track, campaigns that overspend, and billing that goes unverified,” he said in a statement.
Vaudit claims a system that uses AI to continuously scan ad billing records, detect anomalies, and generate structured audit reports. The platform automates tasks that would traditionally require manual reconciliation, including the classification of traffic quality, compliance with ad platform billing rules, and the identification of charge discrepancies. The company says it is currently developing agentic workflows that will allow its AI to not only surface anomalies but take predefined actions, such as initiating refunds or pausing spend without human intervention.
“While fraud prevention in adtech is an established category, no one has truly looked at the bill, scrutinizing whether platforms actually deliver on what they were set up to do,” said Piotr Korzeniowski, Vaudit’s newly appointed COO.
New Capital, New COO, and Plans to Scale
The recent seed round brings Vaudit’s total funding to $8.5 million. Key investors include Omar Hamoui, who previously founded AdMob (acquired by Google for $750 million), and Binh Tran, co-founder of Klout. Hamoui called Vaudit’s approach “category-defining,” while Tran described it as the “missing trust layer” in digital ad buying.
Vaudit’s customer base spans large enterprises, performance marketing teams, and agency partners, all of whom are under increasing scrutiny to justify media spend. The platform is currently optimized for web and mobile spend across major players like Google and Meta, but Hahn says the roadmap includes support for additional platforms, including Amazon, TikTok, and mobile in-app networks.
The company’s pitch rests on both its technical architecture and its audit-first design philosophy. Each of its actions, the company says, complies with platform billing policies, helping customers avoid disputes and retain reach while enforcing billing accuracy.
