AI Search Optimization (GEO/AEO) Startups 2026: Who Has Raised $604M, How Much, and From Whom

About $604 million in disclosed venture funding has gone to the 10 AI search optimization (GEO/AEO) startups Value Add VC tracked as of October 16, 2026, and Profound alone holds about $335 million of it after a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation.

These are the companies that sell brands a way to see, and change, what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews say about them. The category goes by two names, generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO); our SEO vs AEO vs GEO guide covers the difference. This page covers the money: every disclosed round, lead investor and reported valuation, each with its source. The $604 million is Value Add VC's sum of each company's latest reported funding total, not a market-wide figure.

AI search optimization startups in 2026: the short answer

AI search optimization startups had disclosed about $604 million across 10 companies as of October 16, 2026, per Value Add VC's count of company announcements and press reports. Profound is the only unicorn. Bluefish, AirOps and Brandlight form a second tier with $36 million to $68 million each, and Scrunch has already been sold, to Sitecore, for a reported $225 million.

The table below is the market map. "Total raised" is the latest cumulative figure a company or a named outlet has published, and every valuation is the one reported at that round. Where a company has never disclosed a round, we say so rather than estimate one.

The GEO/AEO market map: who has raised how much?

Sources: TechCrunch, Fortune, Adweek, AdExchanger, CTech, AlleyWatch, The Next Web, PYMNTS, Startup Fortune and company releases (PR Newswire, WebWire, GlobeNewswire), each linked in the sections below. Profound's total is Value Add VC's sum of Fortune's $155M through Series C and the $180M Series D. Evertune's figure is its $4M seed plus $15M Series A.

How we counted: venture-backed companies whose main product is AI search visibility (GEO/AEO); rounds announced August 2024 to October 16, 2026; 12 companies listed, 10 with a disclosed funding total; as of October 16, 2026.

How much has Profound raised, and why is it so far ahead?

Profound raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation on September 15, 2026, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, per TechCrunch, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and South Park Commons participating. The company told TechCrunch its revenue tripled in the six months before the round and that it has more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including Comcast, Estée Lauder and Walmart.

The climb took 25 months. Profound announced a $3.5 million seed on August 12, 2024 with Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures and South Park Commons. A $20 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins followed in June 2025, then a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia in August 2025 that took total funding to $58.5 million, according to Adweek. Lightspeed led a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in February 2026, bringing total funding to $155 million, Fortune reported; at that point it served more than 700 enterprise customers and 10% of the Fortune 500.

Our full round-by-round breakdown is in the Profound valuation deep dive, and the news coverage of each round sits on the Profound company hub, including the Series D story and the Series C story.

Who is in the second tier?

Bluefish: $68 million, built for the Fortune 500

New York-based Bluefish closed a $43 million Series B on April 14, 2026, co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA, with Amex Ventures, TIAA Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Bloomberg Beta participating, per the company's release. That took its total to $68 million, and Bluefish says about 10% of the Fortune 500 use the platform. Eight months earlier, its $20 million Series A was led by NEA and Salesforce Ventures and brought total funding to $24 million, AdExchanger reported.

AirOps: $62.5 million and a $225 million valuation

AirOps raised a $40 million Series B led by Greylock at a $225 million valuation on November 10, 2025, Fortune reported. Founded in 2021, AirOps has raised $62.5 million in total, backed by Frontline Ventures, Greylock, Unusual Ventures, Village Global, Wing Venture Capital and Xfund, per AlleyWatch. It is the one company here that began as something else: its $15.5 million Series A in October 2024 funded an all-in-one platform for AI-generated marketing content, TechCrunch wrote at the time, before it repositioned around AI search.

Brandlight: $36 million in 16 months

Brandlight, founded in October 2024, raised a $30 million Series A led by Pelion Venture Partners on February 11, 2026, with Cardumen Capital and G20 Ventures returning, bringing total funding to $36 million, CTech reported. The company names Kimberly-Clark, LG, The Hartford and Estée Lauder as customers in its release. It came out of stealth in April 2025 with $5.75 million.

The early-stage field: Peec AI, Evertune, Searchable, geoSurge and AthenaHQ

Peec AI, based in Berlin, raised a $21 million Series A led by Singular in November 2025, four months after a seed round led by 20VC, TechCrunch reported. Its CEO said the valuation was above $100 million, and annual recurring revenue passed $4 million 10 months after launch, with 1,300 companies and agencies on the platform. By June 2026 Peec had crossed $10 million in ARR and was reportedly in talks to raise about $10 million at a $200 million pre-money valuation, The Next Web wrote, citing Sifted; that round had not been announced as of October 16, 2026. Peec has raised $29.1 million across three rounds.

Evertune launched in October 2024 with a $4 million seed led by Eniac Ventures, Business Insider reported, and added a $15 million Series A led by Felicis in August 2025, per Pulse 2.0.

Searchable, which operates from New York and London, raised $14 million led by Headline at an $85 million valuation on May 18, 2026, and said it reached $2 million in revenue in 4.5 months with nearly 1,000 customers, per its release. geoSurge raised a $12 million seed led by AlbionVC in July 2026, PYMNTS reported.

AthenaHQ (often just "Athena"), based in San Francisco, launched from stealth on June 17, 2025 with $2.2 million from Y Combinator, FCVC, Red Bike Capital and Amino Capital, per its launch release. Two well-known tools have no disclosed funding: Otterly.ai, the Austria-based monitoring tool that says more than 40,000 marketing professionals use it (October 2026 release), and Goodie, which Built In lists among AI search optimization platforms. We list both as "funding undisclosed" rather than guess.

How has GEO/AEO funding grown over time?

Funding in the category roughly doubled from 2025 to 2026. The 18 dated rounds below add up to about $572 million: $174 million across all of 2025 and $375 million in the first three quarters of 2026, by Value Add VC's sums as of October 16, 2026. Profound's Series C and Series D account for $276 million of the 2026 figure. No round with a disclosed amount landed in the first quarter of 2025, as of October 16, 2026.

Which VCs back AI search optimization startups?

The investor overlap is close to zero. Across the rounds cited on this page, no lead investor appears in two of these companies, and we found no institutional investor named in more than one company's round. Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed each led a Profound round; Greylock took AirOps; NEA and Threshold took Bluefish; Felicis took Evertune; Headline took Searchable. Each top-tier firm has made one bet on the category.

Source: the round announcements and reports linked in the sections above. How we counted: lead and co-lead investors named in a cited source; August 2024 to October 16, 2026; 14 lead investors; as of October 16, 2026.

One pattern stands out: strategic money is arriving. Salesforce Ventures and Amex Ventures sit in Bluefish, and Scrunch's buyer was a software company, Sitecore, not a fund. Brands buying these tools are the same enterprises those corporate investors sell to.

What did the Scrunch acquisition show?

Sitecore, the enterprise content and digital-experience platform, acquired Scrunch in a deal valued at around $225 million, Adweek reported on June 3, 2026, citing Bloomberg. Scrunch had raised about $26 million from investors including Mayfield, Decibel, Homebrew and GTM Capital, with a $15 million Series A announced in July 2025, Startup Fortune noted. On those reported figures the sale returned roughly 8.7 times the capital raised (Value Add VC's arithmetic), about 10 months after the Series A release.

Our read (opinion)

This section is Value Add VC's opinion, not reported fact. One read on the numbers: GEO/AEO is splitting into two businesses. Profound, Bluefish and Brandlight are selling to Fortune 500 marketing departments and moving from dashboards to agents that do the work. Peec AI, Otterly.ai and Searchable are winning on price and self-serve volume. The middle, a monitoring dashboard with neither enterprise depth nor a low price, looks like the place a company gets acquired from, which is what happened to Scrunch.

We also think the lack of investor overlap matters. When every major firm has exactly one horse, follow-on capital tends to flow to the leader instead of spreading out. That is consistent with Profound raising $276 million in seven months while the rest of the 2026 rounds totaled $99 million.

Where we could be wrong

Visibility tracking may become a feature inside larger SEO and marketing suites, not a company. The Next Web's Peec coverage made the same point: if monitoring becomes a feature, Peec's reported $200 million price looks steep. The funding totals here also undercount the market, because Otterly.ai, Goodie and many seed-stage tools have never disclosed rounds, and we only count what a source states. For how to measure AI visibility yourself before paying for any of these tools, see our guide to tracking AEO and GEO, our first-party AI search traffic data, and our breakdown of Google's AI optimization guide.

How we built this market map

We started from Value Add VC's intelligence store and funding tracker, which had Profound's rounds, then added companies whose main product is visibility in AI answers and that have announced venture funding. Every figure was re-checked against the linked source on October 16, 2026. Totals are each company's latest cumulative figure as published; where a total was not published, we added only rounds a source states. Valuations appear only where a company or outlet reported one, and the Peec AI $200 million figure is labelled as talks because the round had not been announced. This page will be updated as rounds close.