As consumers ditch Google for ChatGPT, Peec AI raises $21M to help brands adapt

With consumers increasingly asking questions of ChatGPT — not Google — product discovery is changing. And the promise to give brands visibility and control over this fast-growing search channel has made Peec AI one of Europe’s hottest startups.

Just four months after its Seed round led by 20VC, the Berlin-based startup has raised a $21 million Series A led by European VC firm Singular. CEO Marius Meiners declined to disclose the valuation, but said it had tripled and was now above $100 million.

This comes after Peec AI grew its annual recurring revenue to more than $4 million in only ten months since its launch, attracting 1,300 companies and agencies to its platform.

These customers use Peec AI to monitor how their brands appear in AI-powered searches. But beyond analytics on visibility and ranking, Peec AI also tracks sentiment — and which sources shape these answers.

These insights are what make Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) possible — a way for marketing teams to optimize their brand’s presence in AI search results, similar to how SEO works for traditional search engines. With this promise, the startup says it is now adding some 300 customers a month, and its new funding will accelerate this growth while also supporting expansion plans.

Thanks to its new round, which was also backed by Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc, and S20, the startup plans to hire some 40 people in the next six months. These roles are mostly based in Berlin, where Meiners met his two cofounders in Antler’s Winter 2024 cohort: Tobias Siwonia is now Peec AI’s CTO, and Daniel Drabo is its CRO.

Expanding fast and being visible may be key to winning in an emerging category that could soon become crowded, with competitors already including New York-based Profound and Austrian startup OtterlyAI.

To help attract more talent, the 20-person startup is currently advertising itself on large outdoor ads throughout Germany’s capital city. But beyond its Berlin plans, Meiners told TechCrunch that Peec AI also plans to open a sales-focused office in New York City in the second quarter of next year.

As more GEO-focused tools become available, and SEO dashboards add AI tracking capabilities, Peec AI hopes to differentiate itself by offering marketing teams a dashboard that expands in scope while remaining simple to use, despite the fast-changing nature of AI searches.

Instead of revolving around keywords like SEO tools, Peec AI’s dashboard centers on prompts for which brands would like to show up well in search results. Customers can track up to 25 prompts for €75 per month ($87), increasing to 100 prompts for €169 per month ($196). Both plans offer free trials, unlike its enterprise offering, which starts from €424 per month ($493).

To make these insights actionable, the dashboard also suggests actions that can improve visibility and positive sentiment. For instance, its home page suggests that a company that wants to be the answer to a query on “the best CRMs for fast-growing companies” may want to “join r/CRM subreddit discussions” on Reddit.

This recommendation also relates to the “source insights” that are at the core of Peec AI and could guide the content strategy of its users. The startup observed that mentions in tier 1 media outlets don’t give more visibility than articles by lesser-known publications whose headlines are closer to the original question — for instance, on “the best healthcare investors in Berlin.”

Companies that already use its tools include Axel Springer, Chanel, n8n, ElevenLabs, TUI, and more, as AI searches gain ground across sectors, both for B2C and for B2B searches. However, users also turn to ChatGPT and the like for many other tasks and requests, which means that the startup has to cut through noise behind the scenes.

To achieve this, Peec AI bought raw datasets of these requests, but that’s just the beginning. “We have to filter all these out to really get the questions that people ask around brands or purchases and products and services,” Meiners said.

For all the simplicity on the outside, that proprietary data pipeline may be the key to Peec AI’s success. This also serves as a reminder that the AI value chain is not only about models and that the AI application layer and underlying data have become a prime territory for European startups, now including Peec AI.