As consumers increasingly turn to conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines such as Google, the very nature of how people discover products and brands is undergoing a profound transformation. This paradigm shift toward AI-mediated discovery is rewriting the rules of online visibility, and the growing opportunity to offer companies greater control and insight into this new medium has propelled Peec AI into the spotlight as one of Europe’s fastest-emerging and most closely watched technology startups.
Only four months after completing its Seed funding round — which was spearheaded by the prominent investment collective 20VC — the Berlin-based company has closed a remarkable $21 million Series A round led by the European venture capital firm Singular. Although CEO and cofounder Marius Meiners declined to reveal Peec AI’s current valuation, he did confirm that it has tripled since the Seed phase, now placing it comfortably above the $100 million threshold. This rapid increase reflects growing investor confidence and market interest in Peec AI’s mission to redefine how brands manage their visibility in an age of generative AI search.
The company’s financial trajectory underscores this confidence. In just ten months since its public launch, Peec AI successfully expanded its annual recurring revenue (ARR) to over $4 million, a figure that demonstrates both the pace of adoption and the urgency with which businesses are adapting to the AI search landscape. More than 1,300 companies and marketing agencies have already integrated the platform into their analytics and brand monitoring workflows, using it to assess how their names, products, and reputations surface in AI-driven query responses.
Beyond the quantitative metrics of visibility and ranking, Peec AI distinguishes itself by providing nuanced qualitative insights — notably, the ability to measure sentiment and trace which online sources influence the answers generated by AI systems. These features collectively constitute the foundation of what the company has termed Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): an emerging discipline that parallels traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but is designed specifically for optimizing visibility within AI-generated responses. In essence, just as SEO helps brands improve their ranking in Google’s results pages, GEO helps them secure prominent, positive representation in the conversational outputs of advanced AI systems. This novel approach has fueled Peec AI’s monthly growth of roughly 300 new customers and set the stage for even faster expansion fueled by the incoming investment.
The Series A funding round included participation from additional backers such as Antler, Combination VC, identity.vc, and S20, all of whom share an interest in fostering Europe’s growing AI infrastructure and data-centric startups. With this fresh capital, Peec AI plans to hire approximately forty new employees over the next six months, most of whom will work at its headquarters in Berlin. The founding team itself came together in Antler’s Winter 2024 cohort: Tobias Siwonia, the current Chief Technology Officer, and Daniel Drabo, the Chief Revenue Officer, joined Meiners in conceptualizing what would later become Peec AI’s GEO platform.
The market the company is carving out remains nascent but is likely to attract competition rapidly. Already, contenders such as New York–based Profound and Austrian startup OtterlyAI are emerging to capture their share of the same opportunity. In such an environment, the ability to scale swiftly, secure talent, and maintain brand visibility could determine who leads this new category of AI-enabled marketing technology.
To attract top-tier talent in Berlin’s competitive startup ecosystem, Peec AI has launched a large-scale hiring campaign featuring high-visibility outdoor advertising across the city. Yet the company’s ambitions stretch well beyond Germany. Meiners shared with TechCrunch that the next strategic milestone is the establishment of a sales-oriented office in New York City, planned for the second quarter of the coming year, marking Peec AI’s first major step toward developing an international presence.
As the broader market for GEO and AI-integrated SEO tools matures, Peec AI aims to stand apart through an elegant balance of depth and simplicity. Its interface is designed to provide marketing professionals with a robust yet intuitive dashboard that consolidates insights about brand visibility, sentiment, and search prominence across various generative AI outputs. Unlike traditional SEO platforms that rely heavily on keyword indexing, Peec AI’s system is organized around the concept of prompts — the natural-language queries for which brands want to appear prominently when users consult AI assistants. For €75 (about $87) per month, clients can track up to twenty-five such prompts, with higher tiers supporting one hundred prompts for €169 per month (around $196). Enterprise-level solutions start at €424 (approximately $493). Both non-enterprise plans include free trial options to help organizations experiment with GEO strategies before committing longer term.
The platform not only visualizes data but also translates insights into actionable recommendations. For example, a company seeking to become the top AI-generated suggestion for the query “the best CRMs for fast-growing companies” might receive a recommendation to engage actively in community discussions—perhaps by joining relevant Reddit threads such as those under r/CRM—to increase its visibility and perceived authority. These recommendations derive from Peec AI’s “source insights,” which analyze which articles, discussions, or media mentions most strongly influence AI-generated search outcomes. Surprisingly, the company’s analysis revealed that being featured in prestigious tier-one outlets does not necessarily yield more visibility than coverage in smaller, niche publications whose content closely matches the phrasing and context of specific user queries, such as an article focusing on “the best healthcare investors in Berlin.”
Companies across a wide range of sectors—from media giants like Axel Springer to luxury brands such as Chanel, and from automation startups like n8n to tourism group TUI—already rely on Peec AI’s tools. This adoption reflects not only the reach of AI-based search but also its applicability to both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) contexts. Because users increasingly ask AI assistants about virtually everything—from purchase decisions to service comparisons—Peec AI faces the challenge of filtering through a massive volume of unrelated or irrelevant data.
To address this, the company sources large raw datasets consisting of real-world AI user queries. However, as Meiners explained, simply acquiring these datasets is only the starting point of a much more complex operation. Peec AI must perform extensive filtering and refinement to isolate the subset of questions that directly pertain to brands, products, and purchasing intent. This intricate data-processing pipeline, though hidden behind a clean and seemingly simple user interface, represents a core component of the startup’s competitive advantage.
Ultimately, this proprietary data infrastructure illustrates an essential truth about today’s AI economy: value creation does not lie solely in model development but also in the quality of data and the sophistication of applications built atop it. Peec AI’s progress underscores how European startups are increasingly staking a claim in this crucial layer of the AI ecosystem — the intersection of applied intelligence, data analytics, and strategic business use cases — where innovation in visibility and control over AI searches is rapidly defining the next frontier of digital marketing.
Sourse: https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/17/as-ai-search-upends-brand-discovery-peec-ai-hits-4m-arr-and-raises-21m/
