London-based startup Searchable has raised €4.5 million (£4 million) in funding at a €45 million (£40 million) valuation to power the next frontier of digital marketing: visibility within AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The round was led by early-stage investor Freestyle VC and comes as major UK brands begin shifting from incumbent US platforms to this new AI-first marketing approach.
“AI is changing marketing faster than Google did,” says founder Chris Donnelly, a serial entrepreneur behind Verb and Lottie. “We’re no longer optimising for humans. We’re optimising for the platforms that talk to humans.”
Searchable’s funding is part of a growing wave of European startups grabbing early-stage capital to build tools for marketing in an AI-first world. For example:
Peec AI – based in Berlin – raised €18 million in a Series A to expand its AI-powered brand-visibility and marketing platform.
Massive Dynamic – in Paris – raised €3 million in a pre-Seed round to build an AI-native suite for automating digital marketing operations.
This suggests that investors are seriously backing the shift from traditional marketing tools toward solutions optimised for AI search engines, recommendation engines and automated workflows. Searchable’s €4.5 M round may be smaller than Peec AI’s Series A – but it nonetheless positions the startup among a growing group betting on AI-driven brand visibility.
“The way consumers search has changed drastically in the past year and AEO has emerged as a defining consumer category”, says Maria Palma, General Partner at Freestyle VC lead investor in the round. “While we have seen some companies start to innovate in AI marketing, the team at Searchable has the leading analytics tool but more importantly a recommendation engine that shows brands how to take hold of this opportunity.”
Founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneur Chris Donnelly, Searchable offers a tool that gives marketing teams a real-time view into how their brand is being surfaced, ranked, and recommended by LLMs. It’s a timely proposition in a market where AI-generated answers are rapidly replacing traditional link-based search results.
Searchable works by monitoring brand visibility across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and offering clear actions to improve it. From rewriting content to boosting metadata readability for LLMs, the platform essentially acts as an agentic AI marketing assistant.
It integrates directly with Google Analytics and Search Console, and allows marketers to ask questions in plain English, such as “Which AI models recommend us?” or “Where are we losing visibility?”
The startup’s invite-only soft launch generated six figures in recurring revenue within its first 24 hours, with multiple global clients reportedly migrating from established US competitors.
Among early clients, results reportedly include a 40% increase in AI visibility and a 50% reduction in manual SEO workload.
Donnelly is no stranger to building digital companies. At 35, he has already built and exited two major ventures.
His first, Verb Brands, began as a student project with just €455 (£400) and a laptop, eventually becoming a luxury digital agency with clients like Bugatti and Jimmy Choo. He sold the business in 2021 in an eight-figure private equity deal. He then co-founded Lottie, a HealthTech platform focused on eldercare, which scaled to a €284 million (£250 million) valuation in just three years.
Now, with Searchable, Donnelly is tackling what he sees as the next great paradigm shift in marketing: the age of AI-driven search. The company was built in just 60 days and is positioning itself as the go-to platform for AI Search Engine Optimisation (AEO).
“It’s the new front door to the internet,” says Donnelly. “If you’re not indexed, you don’t exist.”
With AI search expected to become a multi-billion-euro market by 2030, and projections suggesting €30–50 billion in new value creation, Searchable is betting big that brands will need help navigating this shift – and doing it fast.
The startup’s product roadmap includes predictive modelling and automated training of AI systems to maintain optimal brand visibility.
Donnelly compares the moment to the early Facebook ad days. ““In 2012, £10 in Facebook spend could return hundreds because no one else was doing it,” he says. “That same window exists now – for brands who learn to be visible to AI.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/12/which-ai-models-recommend-us-searchable-raises-e4-5-million-to-help-teams-understand-their-brand-in-the-ai-age/
