The New York startup is wagering that showing up in ChatGPT matters as much as ranking on Google—and that CMOs are finally ready to spend on it.
There's a telling moment buried in Brandlight's pitch to investors: Adobe data from last summer showing that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites had exploded 4,700 percent year-over-year. Not hundreds of percent. Thousands.
For Imri Marcus, the startup's CEO, that number crystallized a hunch he'd been nursing since founding the company in October 2024. Traditional search was fracturing. Consumers were asking ChatGPT where to buy running shoes, querying Perplexity about skincare routines, leaning on Microsoft Copilot for B2B software recommendations. And brands? They were flying blind.
On February 11, 2026, Brandlight announced it had closed a $30 million Series A led by Pelion Venture Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $36 million. The round, which included returning backers Cardumen Capital and G20 Ventures, validates a premise that might have seemed fringe even 18 months ago: that monitoring—and eventually manipulating—how your brand appears in AI-generated answers is no longer optional.
It's becoming budgeted.
The Control Room for AI Visibility
Brandlight's platform does something deceptively straightforward. It tracks how brands surface in AI responses across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Perplexity, and a lengthening list of generative search engines. More than 100 regions. Share of voice, citation frequency, sentiment, competitive positioning. The software maps which external sources—news articles, reviews, company websites—actually shape what an AI says about you.
For marketing executives navigating this shift, it's a control room of sorts. One they apparently want: Less than a year from launch, Brandlight counts Kimberly-Clark, LG, The Hartford, and Estée Lauder among its customers, plus several dozen other Fortune 500 names the company declined to specify.
"2026 marks the first year AI visibility becomes a dedicated line item in marketing budgets," the company claimed in its announcement. That's a bold assertion, though not without evidence. OpenAI began piloting ads inside ChatGPT late last year. Stripe rolled out in-chat checkout in September 2025. Discovery, media buying, and commerce are collapsing into single conversational surfaces—and marketers are realizing they need new tools to measure what's working.
Perhaps more urgently, to understand what's not working. Because unlike Google, where you can at least see your organic ranking and bid on keywords, AI search results feel opaque. Which sources matter? Why does a competitor get cited three times while you're invisible? Brandlight promises answers.
From Tracking to Buying Influence
Marcus co-founded Brandlight with CTO Dvir "Didi" Dvash and Uri Gafni. The company started with monitoring, but the Series A capital—raised from Pelion and existing investors who co-led its $5.75 million seed round in April 2025—is earmarked for something more ambitious: what Brandlight calls "AI-native advertising."
In practice, that means tools to act on visibility insights. Optimizing content so AI models cite you more often. Managing the web of external sources these systems pull from. And eventually, buying your way into answers as platforms commercialize access.
The startup's Navigator platform processes what it describes as billions of AI-generated signals daily, converting them into playbooks for marketing, PR, content, and media teams. It integrates with CMS and CRM systems, holds SOC 2 Type II certification, and checks the enterprise security boxes that Fortune 500 procurement departments require.
Israeli tech outlet Calcalist reported Brandlight employs around 35 people across Israel and the U.S., with aggressive hiring plans. Pelion Venture Partners confirmed its lead role via LinkedIn, framing the bet around AI's redrawing of the discovery-to-purchase funnel.
The firm joins a cap table that includes marketing veterans Tony Weisman, David Edelman, Sarah Fay, and John Nardone—names meant to signal insider credibility in an industry famously skeptical of shiny new platforms.
A Category That Didn't Exist Two Years Ago
CB Insights lists Brandlight among startups competing in "generative engine optimization," a market niche so new it barely has settled terminology. Competitors include Evertune and Azoma, both early-stage. Even Wix, the website builder, has started rolling out AI visibility features as table stakes.
The company has also inked partnerships with Data Axle and Demand Spring, extending reach into B2B verticals and data-driven optimization workflows. It's the kind of ecosystem-building that suggests Brandlight believes the window is open—but not indefinitely.
There's an implied urgency here. AI search isn't dominant yet, but it's growing fast enough that brands are trying to establish footholds before the rules solidify. Or before Google, Meta, and Microsoft lock down the market with first-party tools that make third-party monitoring redundant.
Which raises the natural question: Is Brandlight building a sustainable business, or racing to get acquired before the giants enter?
Betting on the Budget Line
For now, Marcus and his team seem focused on proving the category itself exists—that brands will actually allocate budget to AI visibility the way they do for SEO, paid search, and social media. The Fortune 500 logos help. So does the timing: Adobe's numbers suggest consumer behavior has already shifted, even if marketing departments are still catching up.
The startup's pitch, essentially, is that 2026 is the inflection year. The moment AI search stops being an experiment tucked inside digital strategy decks and starts demanding its own P&L. Brandlight wants to own that transition.
Whether $30 million and a year's head start will be enough—well, that's the bet. And in a market moving this fast, perhaps the only one worth making.
