Last Updated: 14 July 2026
Promptwatch, an Amsterdam-based startup building tools that help businesses track and improve how they appear in AI-generated search results, has closed a €6 million seed round after reaching €2 million in annual recurring revenue in just 12 months. Co-founded by Gijs de Groot and Klaas Foppen in 2025, the company operates in a category known as Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO — a new discipline that focuses on making brands visible not in traditional Google results, but in the answers produced by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
The shift behind this funding is significant. As more people turn to AI assistants for product research and buying decisions, traditional search traffic is declining. Gartner has predicted that organic search volume could drop by 25 percent or more by 2026, and AI referral traffic to websites grew 527 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2025. The global GEO market, still in its early stages, was valued at roughly $848 million in 2025 and is projected to reach $19.8 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate above 50 percent. For marketers, the challenge is clear: the way customers find and evaluate brands is changing, and most companies are not yet equipped to respond.
The €6 million round was led by Seed + Speed Ventures, a Berlin-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage B2B software. Blum Ventures also participated, while existing investor Arches Capital doubled down on its pre-seed commitment from September 2025. The company had previously raised €1.2 million in pre-seed funding, making this a notably capital-efficient growth path to more than €2 million in ARR.
Generative Engine Optimization sits at the intersection of two trends: the rapid adoption of AI-powered search tools and the decline of traditional click-based search. Unlike conventional SEO, which aims to rank a webpage among Google's top results, GEO focuses on whether an AI model cites or recommends a brand when answering a user's question. The difference matters because AI answers often resolve a query without the user clicking through to any website at all — a pattern known as "zero-click search," which now accounts for roughly 56 to 69 percent of all Google queries, depending on the study.
The market is still new but growing quickly. According to a BrightEdge survey, 32 percent of digital marketing leaders named GEO as their top priority for 2026, yet only about 23 percent of marketers currently invest in measuring their AI search performance. That gap between awareness and action is one reason investors see opportunity in platforms that can close it. As AI tools like ChatGPT now process billions of queries per day and platforms such as Perplexity continue to grow rapidly, the window for brands to establish visibility in AI-generated answers is narrowing.
Promptwatch plans to use the new capital to expand on several fronts. The company is opening an office in New York to move closer to international brands, marketing agencies, and enterprise customers. It is also growing its engineering and go-to-market teams to accelerate product development.
A central focus of the investment is the buildout of what Promptwatch calls "Agentic AI Search Optimization." The idea is that instead of requiring marketing teams to manually track and adjust their AI visibility, Promptwatch's AI agents can continuously monitor and optimize a company's presence across AI models. Companies connect their website to the platform, and the agents handle the ongoing work of improving how AI describes and recommends the brand.
The company is also investing in deeper integrations with AI platforms. Its existing features already include a Content Agent, automated actions, and support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows organizations to connect Promptwatch directly with AI tools. The next phase aims to make these capabilities more automated and scalable, reducing the hands-on effort required from marketing teams.
Promptwatch was founded in 2025 by Gijs de Groot (CEO) and Klaas Foppen, after the pair noticed that businesses had no reliable way to track what AI models were saying about them. Traditional SEO tools were not built to handle this problem, so they set out to create something new. The company launched its platform on April 1, 2025, and signed its first 100 customers within a week.
Today, the platform serves more than 1,800 brands and agencies, adding more than 150 new customers per month. Its client list includes Duolingo, Fireflies, Monks, ABN AMRO, WPP, and iO Digital. The platform collects over 100 million data points daily from real AI interactions — including prompts, responses, citations, model updates, agent traffic, and content performance — and uses this dataset to help organizations understand and improve how AI models describe their brand. In plain terms, if a user asks ChatGPT or Claude about a product category, Promptwatch can show whether a brand is being mentioned, what sources are being cited, and what content changes could improve that visibility.
"In less than a year, we've built some of the industry's most advanced AI Search Optimization features, including our Content Agent, Actions, and MCP (Model Context Protocol), allowing organizations to connect Promptwatch directly with AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Today, we're taking the next step with Agentic AI Search Optimization, making it easier for organizations to scale their AI Search strategy through automated execution."
Gijs de Groot, CEO and Co-founder of Promptwatch
What differentiates Promptwatch, according to the company, is the scale and nature of its data. Rather than relying solely on back-end APIs, the platform tracks real-world AI interactions and citations to build a picture of how AI models actually behave when users ask questions. The company says this proprietary dataset is what powers its optimization recommendations and its newer agentic features.
Seed + Speed Ventures led the €6 million round. The Berlin-based firm backs B2B software startups at the pre-seed and seed stage, typically investing between €500,000 and €2 million initially, with follow-on capacity up to €5 million. Blum Ventures, an Austrian firm that invests in areas including smart living and industrial technology, also participated.
Arches Capital, which invested in Promptwatch's €1.2 million pre-seed round in September 2025, doubled its investment this time. That earlier funding carried the company through its first year, from launch to more than 1,800 customers and €2 million in ARR.
In total, Promptwatch has now raised approximately €7.2 million across both rounds. With a new office in New York and a growing team, the company is betting that AI search optimization will become a standard part of how businesses market themselves online.
