According to TechCrunch, Berlin-based Peec AI just raised a $21 million Series A led by Singular just four months after its Seed round, with the startup’s valuation tripling to over $100 million. The funding comes after the company reached more than $4 million in annual recurring revenue in only ten months since launch, attracting 1,300 companies and agencies to its platform. CEO Marius Meiners co-founded the company with Tobias Siwonia and Daniel Drabo through Antler’s Winter 2024 cohort. The startup plans to hire 40 people in the next six months and open a New York sales office next year while facing emerging competition from Profound and OtterlyAI.
The search landscape is changing fast
Here’s the thing – people aren’t just Googling stuff anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT about products, services, and brands. And when you think about it, that completely changes how discovery works. Traditional SEO becomes less relevant when answers are generated rather than ranked from existing web pages.
Peec AI’s whole premise is monitoring how brands appear in these AI-powered searches. But it goes beyond just tracking visibility – they’re analyzing sentiment and, crucially, which sources are shaping these answers. That’s what enables what they’re calling Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which is basically the AI search equivalent of SEO.
How it actually works
Instead of focusing on keywords like traditional SEO tools, Peec AI’s dashboard centers on prompts. Customers pay €75 monthly to track 25 prompts or €169 for 100 prompts, with enterprise plans starting at €424. The platform doesn’t just show you where you stand – it suggests actions to improve visibility and sentiment.
For example, if a company wants to appear for “the best CRMs for fast-growing companies,” Peec AI might recommend joining r/CRM subreddit discussions. That’s because they’ve found that mentions in lesser-known publications with headlines closer to the original question can be more effective than tier 1 media coverage. Pretty counterintuitive, right?
The real challenge is filtering signal from noise
CEO Marius Meiners told TechCrunch they buy raw datasets of user requests, but then face the massive task of filtering out all the non-commercial queries. “We have to filter all these out to really get the questions that people ask around brands or purchases and products and services,” he said. This proprietary data processing might be their secret sauce.
And that’s the interesting part – while everyone’s focused on AI models, the real value might be in the application layer and the underlying data pipelines. European startups like Peec AI are finding their footing here, backed by investors including Combination VC, identity.vc, and S20.
Where this is all heading
The market’s moving incredibly fast. Peec AI is adding about 300 customers monthly and already counts Axel Springer, Chanel, and TUI among its users. But with SEO dashboards inevitably adding AI tracking features and competitors emerging, the race is on.
Their Berlin hiring spree and planned New York expansion suggest they’re trying to scale quickly before the space gets crowded. And those outdoor ads throughout Germany’s capital? That’s not just about hiring – it’s about establishing category leadership while they still can.
Basically, we’re watching the birth of an entirely new marketing category. And for brands that have spent decades optimizing for Google, the rules are being rewritten in real time.
