Problem

Lapis addresses the fragmented, labor-intensive process of running paid acquisition. Growth teams must develop strategy, write copy, produce creative, configure campaigns, build landing pages, launch across channels, and then interpret performance data. The company positions the pain as particularly acute for DTC and SaaS businesses, where human design and creative bottlenecks slow experimentation and make it difficult to learn quickly from live campaigns.

The economics are meaningful: Lapis cites agency engagements costing roughly $10,000–$49,999 per project and about $9,900 per month on average, before production, revisions, and the customer’s own team time. Its core use case is therefore a growth team that needs to test many ad angles and audiences rapidly across channels, while ensuring that each click lands on a relevant, conversion-oriented page instead of paying for disconnected creative and campaign work.

Product / Service

Lapis is an AI-native paid-advertising operating system. It reads a company’s website to understand its products, customers, logo, colors, typography, and voice, then turns that context into campaign strategy, ad copy, images, audience variations, and channel-ready assets for platforms including Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit. Its agents can launch campaigns, create ad-matched landing pages, run A/B tests on live traffic, and continuously use click and conversion results to improve targeting, bids, creative, and pages.

The delivery model combines software and managed services. Customers can use self-serve plans to create, forecast, and launch campaigns themselves, with plans starting free and paid tiers listed at $99 per month for Basic and $599 per month for Pro. Alternatively, managed customers receive Lapis agents and a dedicated strategist who handle campaign production, experimentation, launch, reporting, optimization, and budget recommendations within agreed guardrails; managed traditional and ChatGPT/LLM advertising is custom-priced.

Market

Lapis competes in MarketingTech SaaS at the intersection of AI ad generation, creative management, campaign automation, and paid-growth operations. Its differentiation is the attempt to connect the whole loop—from brand understanding and creative production through media deployment, matched landing pages, experimentation, and performance learning—rather than offering only an image generator or copywriting tool. Comparable and adjacent alternatives include Canva, Simplified, and AKOOL, which G2 lists as Lapis alternatives, as well as broader creative-management platforms such as Celtra, Smartly, and AdRoll.

The company is an active San Francisco startup founded in 2025 and part of Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch. Its YC profile reports usage by more than 1,500 marketing teams and 30-plus enterprises, including Fortune 500 and fast-growing DTC businesses, which is meaningful early traction; the evidence does not provide a verified revenue figure, so it is best characterized as an early commercial company rather than definitively pre-revenue. Because that same YC profile also contains an older AI-search product description, the adoption figures should be treated as company-reported directional traction and not as independently verified proof that every user is using the current paid-ads product.