Seattle-based startup Optimly recently closed an $800,000 pre-seed funding round to address an urgent challenge facing corporate marketers: controlling how generative AI models represent their products and brands online. Founded by former Microsoft, Meta, and Discord executive Apurva Luty, the company has developed a platform that allows businesses to audit, claim, and correct the structured data that synthetic answer engines ingest from across the web.
The Shift from Search Engines to Answer Engines
For decades, digital brand strategy revolved around search engine optimization, directing online traffic to official corporate websites. Today, consumer discovery is shifting rapidly as buyers turn to conversational AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for product comparisons and recommendations.
However, modern artificial intelligence models rarely rely on official corporate homepages to understand a business. Instead, these algorithms scrape third-party sources—including Wikipedia entries, Reddit discussions, review aggregates, and media coverage—and synthesize those external viewpoints into definitive answers for shoppers.
This structural change leaves marketing teams vulnerable to hallucinated claims, outdated specs, and distorted brand narratives generated by automated conversational agents.
Building a Universal Public Directory for AI Agents
Optimly tackles this intelligence gap through a dual-layered system designed specifically for machine readability rather than human browsing. The core offering rests on a public directory called the AI Brand Index, which presents structured, neutral factual profiles of companies compiled from public web sources.
The platform has already evaluated approximately 60,000 brands, with more than 24,000 profiles active and searchable. The index provides the brief, declarative statements that automated web agents require when processing factual information about a corporate entity.
To manage these profiles, Optimly offers BrandVault, a subscription service where verified business owners rewrite their entries in precise, non-promotional language that AI models can parse efficiently. The tool continuously tracks how major chatbots describe the brand and flags inaccurate responses for corrective action.
Rapid Ingestion and Market Traction
The venture began as an experiment when Optimly published an initial index containing 200 brands to observe whether automated systems would interact with the repository. Major AI developers responded immediately, sending automated crawlers to ingest the structured data.
According to Optimly, OpenAI deployed three distinct bots to the repository—one scraping raw training data, one constructing an internal index, and a third pulling real-time contextual data for active user queries. Anthropic’s Claude system has also integrated data pulls from the platform.
Weekly requests from automated AI agents targeting Optimly’s index jumped from 4,000 to over 11,000 within weeks. Concurrently, more than 100 brands organically claimed their profiles within months of launch, discovering the directory through organic web searches and chatbot citations.
Capital Infusion and Executive Background
Optimly’s market momentum built following a performance at the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Washington, where the team earned $150,000 from the Flywheel Angel Network, a $5,000 audience choice prize, and a $50,000 regional relocation offer. Luty ultimately chose to base the company out of the AI House incubator on Seattle’s Pier 70, retaining the angel backing to complete the broader $800,000 pre-seed round alongside Mighty Capital.
Prior funding included $100,000 raised in late 2025 from Right Side Capital Management and Forum Ventures during an accelerator cohort. The company also participated in the Washington Technology Industry Association accelerator program.
Luty brings a decade of tech strategy and consumer research experience to the venture. Having managed consumer research for the Microsoft Surface rollout, product marketing insights for Meta’s Quest virtual reality push, and user experience research at Discord, Luty observed that shifts in technology consistently change how information must be structured. In the current era, she notes, machine algorithms act as the primary initial consumers of corporate data.
Redefining Search Optimization and Future Outlook
Optimly enters a expanding category known as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). While early market competitors focus primarily on advising brands to publish higher volumes of online content, Optimly aims to establish a measurable link between profile edits and altered chatbot responses.
The business operates on tiered monthly subscriptions ranging from $100 to $799, with long-term plans to transition toward outcome-based pricing linked to verified response accuracy. Optimly is currently recruiting a technical co-founder and senior engineering talent in Seattle to advance its technical infrastructure.
Industry observers should watch whether public verification directories can establish themselves as universal standards across competing AI platforms, or if major AI developers will maintain closed, proprietary indexes. In the near term, Optimly is conducting controlled A/B testing to prove that specific profile modifications reliably alter real-time answers across major conversational AI platforms.
