Product discovery is changing as consumers increasingly ask questions of ChatGPT instead of Google. 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, the Berlin-based startup has raised a twenty-one million dollar 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 one hundred million dollars. This comes after Peec AI grew its annual recurring revenue to more than four million dollars in only ten months since its launch, attracting one thousand three hundred companies and agencies to its platform.
These customers use Peec AI to monitor how their brands appear in AI-powered searches. 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, or GEO, possible. This is 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 three hundred customers a month. 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 forty 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 Otterly AI.
To help attract more talent, the twenty-person startup is currently advertising itself on large outdoor ads throughout Germany’s capital city. 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 twenty-five prompts for seventy-five euros per month, increasing to one hundred prompts for one hundred sixty-nine euros per month. Both plans offer free trials, unlike its enterprise offering, which starts from four hundred twenty-four euros per month. 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 one media outlets do not 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, and TUI, as AI searches gain ground across sectors for both B2C and B2B searches. However, users also turn to ChatGPT and similar tools for many other tasks and requests, which means the startup has to cut through noise behind the scenes. To achieve this, Peec AI bought raw datasets of these requests, but that is just the beginning. The company has 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.