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This startup lets companies teach AI about their brands — and the chatbots are listening
Seattle startup Optimly, which helps brands manage what AI understands and says about them, went into the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Wash., in May as a last-minute entrant, and walked out with a triple crown.
The company won a $150,000 investment, a $50,000 relocation offer contingent on moving to the region, and a $5,000 fan-favorite prize. Founder and CEO Apurva Luty, who’d strolled to the event from her hotel, expecting nothing, ended up with too many giant ceremonial checks to carry back on her own.
This unexpected sweep came from a solution to a problem that’s suddenly becoming urgent for many brands. Optimly builds a public index where brands can claim and correct the information that AI chatbots use to describe them — then measures whether it actually works.
The $150,000 investment from Flywheel Angel Network became part of a broader $800,000 pre-seed round that Optimly closed just recently. Also participating in the round were Mighty Capital and AI House, the Seattle startup incubator formerly known as AI2 Incubator.
“The funny thing about winning at Flywheel is that it got us noticed by Seattle investors,” Luty explained. So even though she has decided to work out of AI House on Seattle’s Pier 70, passing up the relocation prize, the Wenatchee group gets a stake and an assist.
The problem: Optimly addresses a phenomenon that increasingly unsettles marketers: AI models generally don’t learn about a brand from its own website. They read everything else — Wikipedia, Reddit, online reviews, analyst write-ups — and synthesize it into the response each chatbot gives shoppers when they ask about a company, or its product or service.
“Shoppers used to Google — now they ask AI,” Luty said during her presentation at a separate event in June, the Technology Alliance’s Seattle Investor Summit + Showcase in Redmond, where GeekWire first heard the Optimly pitch.
The solution: Optimly has two connected products:
- The AI Brand Index is the free, public layer: a directory that AI agents can pull from, offering a short, structured description of a company generated automatically from across the web. The company says it has scored about 60,000 brands, with more than 24,000 now live and searchable.
- BrandVault is the paid layer. A brand verifies that it owns the name, then rewrites its entry in the plain, factual language an agent can parse, instead of the marketing copy on its website. Optimly then monitors how AI describes the brand and flags what to fix.
Background: Luty founded Optimly in October 2025. A researcher by training, she had studied public policy and economics at the University of Oregon, before a decade in consumer insights and product strategy in tech, studying how people decide which brands to trust.
At Microsoft, she worked on the launch of the Surface line as a consumer research manager. At Meta, she led product marketing insights for the Quest and metaverse products and worked on the rebrand from Facebook to Meta. At Discord, she headed UX research and product strategy during the pivot back to gaming.
Each job, she said, came down to explaining a product to a new group of customers during a big shift in technology. She came to see AI as the next shift, with one difference: this time the initial consumers of the information are the AI systems themselves.
How it caught on: The idea started as an experiment. Optimly put up a small index of about 200 brands, just to see if anyone would notice, and AI agents swarmed it, asking for the data.
OpenAI sent three kinds of bots, Luty said: one crawling for training data, one building its own index, and one pulling live answers for users. The AI giants are each building their own private brand indexes that don’t talk to one another. Optimly wants to be the public, verified version.
Anthropic’s Claude recently started pulling from the index as well.
The brand index now gets about 11,000 agent requests a week, up from 4,000 a few weeks earlier, the company says, and more than 100 brands have claimed their profiles since the index launched this spring. Many found it on their own, through Google or ChatGPT.
Landscape: Other startups already promise to track and improve how brands show up in AI. The category goes by AEO or GEO — answer-engine or generative-engine optimization. Most stop at telling a brand to publish more content, Luty said.
Optimly’s pitch is different. Give a brand a page it can correct, then measure whether the fix changes what the AI says. AI chatbots have already started citing Optimly’s data in live answers, Luty said. The near-term goal is making that repeatable — proving a specific fix leads to a specific change.
Funding: Prior to the $800,000 pre-seed round, Optimly raised an initial $100,000 in late 2025 from Right Side Capital Management and Forum Ventures as part of their accelerator program. It also participated in a WTIA startup accelerator.
Business model: Brands pay monthly subscriptions, with tiers ranging from $100 to $799 a month. Luty said the long-term goal is to charge for results, not reports.
The team: Optimly’s original technical co-founder has stepped back from his role in California into an advisory position. Luty is now hiring in Seattle, with openings for a technical co-founder and a senior founding engineer, and recently brought on a data engineering intern.
She also works with contractors and, yes, makes significant use of AI agents.
What’s next: The focus now is making the early results repeatable — running A/B tests to prove a specific profile fix leads to a specific change in how AI describes a brand.
