Searchable Raises $14M at $85M Valuation as AI Search Becomes a Boardroom Priority

Searchable, the AI performance marketing platform helping businesses compete in AI-driven search, has raised $14 million in funding led by global venture capital firm Headline at an $85 million valuation. The round follows a December 2025 pre-seed of $4 million at a $40 million valuation — meaning the company has nearly doubled its valuation in under six months, a trajectory that reflects the accelerating urgency with which enterprise marketing teams are approaching AI search visibility.

Headline's portfolio includes Bumble, Farfetch, Goop, and Sonos, and notably Semrush — the SEO software group acquired by Adobe in a $1.9 billion deal. The firm's prior investment in Semrush gives it a distinctive vantage point on the transition from traditional SEO to AI-native search optimization, and its conviction that Searchable can occupy a similar category-defining position in the new era.

The Platform

Founded in 2025 by British serial entrepreneur Chris Donnelly — who previously sold SEO agency Verb for $25 million and scaled Lottie Org to a nine-figure valuation — Searchable tracks visibility across 10 AI engines including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek. The platform combines monitoring with an agentic optimization layer that generates content briefs, technical fixes, and actionable recommendations rather than just reporting on current visibility.

The company reached $2 million in revenue in 4.5 months and has onboarded nearly 1,000 customers. Enterprise-scale customers including American Express, KPMG, and Siemens report a 22 percent increase in AI-driven traffic within their first 60 days on the platform. The company holds a G2 High Performer badge for Summer 2026 with a 4.8/5 rating across 93 reviews.

The Investment Thesis

Dominic R. Wilhelm, Partner at Headline, framed the investment in terms that go beyond product features. 'AI-driven discovery is rewriting how customers find products. As more searches are answered directly by AI, brands that are invisible in this layer of search will see less demand. The companies that adapt first will grow market share; those that don't will lose it quietly.' Wilhelm added that Headline sees Searchable becoming 'part of the core infrastructure for this shift, not just reporting on what AI engines say about a brand, but directly improving the visibility and revenue outcomes that matter to management teams and boards.'

Donnelly's own framing of the opportunity is grounded in a specific conversion data point his platform has generated: customers arriving from ChatGPT and other LLMs are converting at three times the rate of traditional organic search visitors. If that figure holds at scale, it reframes AI search visibility not as a brand awareness play but as a direct revenue driver — a shift that changes the budget conversation from marketing to growth.

What Comes Next

With the new capital, Searchable plans to accelerate product development across its execution engine and expand its presence in both the U.S. and U.K. markets. Over the next 12 to 24 months, Donnelly expects three structural shifts to reshape the market: the automation of repetitive manual SEO labor through agentic systems; the rise of AI commerce as a standalone optimization layer; and the convergence of paid and organic AI visibility into unified attribution models. 'Our goal is to give companies an execution layer for AI search that cuts SEO costs by up to 40 percent while growing high-intent traffic,' he said.