TL;DR: Alkimi is a neutral agentic advertising marketplace. It provides the infrastructure for buy-side and sell-side agents to negotiate media deals directly, record the agreed terms in a shared bilateral document accessible to both parties, and enforce the mandate parameters under which each agent is authorised to act. It is not a demand-side platform, not a supply-side platform, and not a programmatic exchange. It is the deal layer that sits between them.
Alkimi was founded to address a specific structural problem in digital advertising: the absence of a shared, independent record of what was agreed between buyers and sellers. In conventional programmatic, buyers and sellers each hold their own version of what happened. Reconciliation is manual, discrepancies are common, and the agreed terms are often a document on a server rather than a bilateral record that both parties can independently access and verify.
Alkimi provides the infrastructure to change this. The core product is an agentic marketplace: an environment where buy-side agents and sell-side agents negotiate deal terms directly, and the outcome is a bilateral deal record held in a shared state that neither party can alter after execution.
What problem does Alkimi solve?
The fundamental problem in programmatic advertising is an accountability gap. Buyers commit budget; publishers provide inventory; and between the two, a chain of intermediaries facilitates the transaction, each taking a fee that is often not fully disclosed. The ANA's 2023 programmatic transparency study estimated that only 36 cents of every dollar spent on open programmatic reached a working media impression. The remaining 64 cents covered technology fees, data costs, and intermediary margins, many of which are not individually disclosed in the standard reporting that buyers receive.
Alkimi addresses this by changing the transaction structure. Rather than routing through a chain of intermediaries, a buy-side agent connected to Alkimi negotiates directly with a sell-side agent representing the publisher. The agreed terms are captured in a DealSheet: a structured bilateral record that contains the agreed price, the inventory specification, the parties to the deal, and the mandate reference linking the transaction back to the buyer's authorised scope. Both parties hold the same DealSheet. Neither can modify it after execution.
How does Alkimi differ from a DSP or an SSP?
A demand-side platform operates on behalf of buyers: it submits bids into auctions and optimises campaign performance. A supply-side platform operates on behalf of publishers: it manages inventory access and yield. Both are intermediaries in the traditional programmatic chain, and both take a fee for their role.
Alkimi is not a DSP and not an SSP. It is the marketplace layer: the environment where agents from both sides meet, negotiate, and record the outcome. Buyers connect their existing buy-side agents or agent-compatible tools to Alkimi via API. Publishers connect their inventory through the Alkimi sell-side integration. Alkimi provides the negotiation channel, the mandate enforcement layer, and the bilateral deal record infrastructure.
The practical difference for buyers is that Alkimi does not represent them. It is a neutral party. Its commercial interest is in the deal services it provides (negotiation, record-keeping, mandate enforcement), not in the direction of the deal. That neutrality is what makes the deal record credible: a record held by a neutral party with read access for both sides is more auditable than a record held by one of the parties to the transaction.
Who uses Alkimi?
Alkimi's primary users are programmatic buyers and agencies managing digital display and video spend, and publishers seeking a direct, auditable route to deal with buy-side agents. The platform is particularly relevant for buyers who have begun to deploy AI agents for media buying and need the mandate and deal record infrastructure to govern that deployment at scale.
Alkimi is live in European markets and actively expanding publisher-side connectivity through AdCP-compliant integrations. It operates under English law and holds its deal records in compliance with standard financial record retention requirements.
What is a DealSheet?
A DealSheet is Alkimi's term for the bilateral deal record generated at the conclusion of a negotiation. It is a structured document containing the agreed deal terms, the parties to the deal, the timestamp of execution, the mandate reference, and the delivery parameters. Both the buy-side and sell-side agents receive the same DealSheet at the point of execution. The DealSheet is the reference document for all subsequent reconciliation: buyers and publishers reconcile their delivery reports against the DealSheet, not against separate ad server logs that the other party cannot access.
The DealSheet is the most direct answer to the accountability question in programmatic: it is a shared, neutral record of what was agreed, accessible to both parties, and independent of any intermediary's reporting interface.