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

As consumers increasingly ask questions to ChatGPT – and not Google – product discovery is changing. And the promise to give brands visibility and control over this fast-growing search channel has been made Peek AI one of the most popular startups in Europe.

Only four months after his 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 reveal the valuation but said it had tripled and was now above $100 million.

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

These customers use Peec AI to monitor how their brands appear in AI-driven searches. But in addition to analyzes about visibility and ranking, Peec AI also tracks sentiment – ​​and which sources determine these answers.

These insights enable Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): 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 commitment, the startup says it will now add around 300 customers per month, and the new funding will accelerate this growth while supporting expansion plans.

Thanks to the new round, which was also supported by Antlers, Combination VC, identity.vcAnd S20the startup plans to hire around 40 people over the next six months. These roles are primarily based in Berlin, where Meiners met his two co-founders in Antler’s Winter 2024 cohort: Tobias Siwonia is now the CTO of Peec AI and Daniel Drabo is the CRO.

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

To attract more talent, the twenty-person startup is currently advertising on large outdoor advertisements in the German capital. But in addition to the 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 easy to use despite the rapidly changing nature of AI search.

Instead of revolving around keywords like SEO tools, Peec AI’s dashboard focuses on prompts for which brands want to appear 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 the business 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 example, the homepage suggests that a company wanting to be the answer to a question about “the best CRMs for fast-growth companies” might want to “join r/CRM subreddit discussions” on Reddit.

This recommendation also addresses the “source insights” that are at the core of Peec AI and can drive the content strategy of its users. The startup noted that mentions in tier 1 media outlets do not provide more visibility than articles from lesser-known publications whose headlines are closer to the original question – for example, about “Berlin’s top healthcare investors.”

Companies already using the tools include Axel Springer, Chanel, n8n, ElevenLabs, TUI and more, as AI search gains traction across industries for both B2C and B2B searches. However, users also turn to ChatGPT and the like for many other tasks and requests, which means the startup has to cut through noise behind the scenes.

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

Despite all the simplicity on the outside, that proprietary data pipeline could be the key to Peec AI’s success. This also reminds us that the AI ​​value chain is not just about models and that the AI ​​application layer and the underlying data have become an important territory for European startups, now including Peec AI.