As consumers increasingly turn to ChatGPT rather than Google for answers to their questions, the way people find, evaluate, and ultimately purchase products is undergoing a profound transformation. The very foundation of product discovery — once dominated by traditional search engines — is shifting toward conversational AI systems that interpret and synthesize information dynamically. Within this rapidly evolving environment, Peec AI has emerged as one of Europe’s most closely watched startups, offering brands not only enhanced visibility within this new kind of search ecosystem but also unprecedented control over how they appear within AI-generated responses.
Only a few months after closing a Seed round led by venture capital firm 20VC, the Berlin-based company has achieved another major milestone: a $21 million Series A funding round headed by the European VC firm Singular. Although CEO Marius Meiners declined to reveal the company’s precise valuation, he confirmed that it has more than tripled, now surpassing the $100 million threshold. The surge in investor confidence is rooted in the company’s remarkable growth trajectory. Within merely ten months of launching its platform, Peec AI expanded its annual recurring revenue to over $4 million, onboarding more than 1,300 businesses and marketing agencies eager to understand how their brands perform in AI-mediated searches.
The company’s platform provides tools that allow its clients to observe how their brands appear in responses created by advanced generative models such as ChatGPT. Beyond simple rankings or visibility statistics, Peec AI delves deeper into the sentiment conveyed by AI-generated answers and identifies the sources that influence these outputs. This analytical layer offers more than descriptive metrics; it provides actionable insights that reveal how AI determines reputational context. These capabilities have paved the way for what the company calls Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a cutting-edge approach designed to help marketing professionals shape and optimize their brand’s representation within AI-driven search environments — in much the same way that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) transformed the traditional search era.
Due to the strong demand for GEO, Peec AI reports onboarding approximately 300 new customers each month. The freshly secured funding will be strategically directed not only toward sustaining this momentum but also toward accelerating expansion into new markets. The round also attracted participation from other notable investors including Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc, and S20. The startup plans to expand its workforce substantially, intending to hire around forty additional employees within the next six months. Most of these roles will be based in Berlin — the birthplace of the company — where Meiners first met his cofounders, Tobias Siwonia and Daniel Drabo, during Antler’s Winter 2024 cohort. Today, Siwonia serves as Chief Technology Officer, while Drabo oversees commercial operations as Chief Revenue Officer.
Moving swiftly is crucial in a nascent category that is evolving at breakneck speed. As the field of AI-centric product search and GEO becomes increasingly competitive, early movers aiming for visibility could establish a decisive advantage. Rivals such as the New York-based startup Profound and the Austrian firm OtterlyAI are already vying for attention, underscoring how quickly this space is becoming crowded.
To strengthen its employer brand and appeal to top-tier recruits, the 20-person company has launched prominent outdoor advertising campaigns across Berlin, positioning itself as one of the city’s rising technology innovators. Meiners also revealed that Peec AI plans to open a sales-focused office in New York City during the second quarter of next year, an initiative intended to deepen its accessibility to U.S. clients and establish a presence in one of the world’s most dynamic marketing ecosystems.
As more GEO-related tools enter the market and traditional SEO dashboards incorporate AI detection features, Peec AI’s strategy centers on differentiation through simplicity and breadth. Its flagship product promises to provide marketing teams with a unified, intuitive interface capable of processing the constantly shifting realities of AI searches. Unlike conventional SEO tools that emphasize keyword tracking, Peec AI’s dashboard allows users to focus on prompts — the full-text queries for which brands wish to appear favorably in generative search results. Pricing is structured in tiers: €75 per month (around $87) for monitoring up to twenty-five prompts, and €169 per month (approximately $196) for one hundred prompts, both plans offering free trials. An enterprise edition starts at €424 monthly (about $493) for larger organizations requiring extended customization.
The system does not merely present these findings passively. Instead, it translates insight into practical guidance. For example, a company aspiring to become one of the top responses to the query “the best CRMs for fast-growing companies” might receive suggestions such as participating in relevant discussions on Reddit’s r/CRM community. These types of recommendations derive from what Peec AI calls its “source insights,” which help customers refine their content strategies by revealing which information pathways—media mentions, social forums, or smaller specialized publications—most heavily influence AI-generated answers. Interestingly, Peec AI’s research shows that coverage in mainstream outlets does not necessarily outperform lesser-known sources when those niche articles closely align with the question phrasing, such as “the best healthcare investors in Berlin.”
The platform is already being used by international clients including Axel Springer, Chanel, n8n, ElevenLabs, and TUI, showcasing broad adoption across both consumer-facing and B2B sectors. This diversity underscores how conversational AI is reshaping discovery across industries. Users pose questions to AI systems for everything from shopping recommendations to complex business analysis, which creates an immense volume of raw input data. To refine these signals, Peec AI acquires extensive datasets of such queries and then applies proprietary filtering methods to isolate those most relevant to commercial and brand-related questions. As Meiners explained, the company’s data pipeline selectively extracts only the interactions that reveal authentic patterns of intent around consumer decisions.
Although the platform delivers a deceptively simple interface for users, behind the scenes lies a highly specialized data infrastructure that may be central to Peec AI’s success. This internal pipeline demonstrates how the true value of the AI ecosystem extends well beyond the creation of foundation models. Increasingly, the competitive edge resides in the application layer — particularly in companies that manage and interpret data that feed into these generative systems. Peec AI exemplifies how European startups are seizing this strategic opportunity, positioning themselves not merely as consumers of AI technology, but as innovators defining the very frameworks through which consumers and brands interact in the age of generative intelligence.
Sourse: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/17/as-consumers-ditch-google-for-chatgpt-peec-ai-raises-21m-to-help-brands-adapt/
