emberos, a Los Angeles company that tracks how artificial intelligence systems talk about brands, pulled in $5.5 million in a seed round on September 3, bringing its total funding to $6.7 million after a pre-seed round of $1.2 million closed in January. The investors, a private group of strategic angels, remain unnamed.
The pitch is straightforward, if somewhat dystopian: companies no longer control how consumers discover them, according to emberos. Google search sent traffic to websites where brands could shape the message. ChatGPT and its peers simply answer questions, often without linking anywhere at all. If the AI gets it wrong, or worse, leaves you out entirely, there's no obvious fix.
emberos built software it describes as an operating system for AI brand management. The platform monitors how large language models represent companies across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek. Then it attempts to predict changes and engineer better outcomes by adjusting the underlying sources these systems crawl.
Five specialized agents power the system, according to company materials released with the funding announcement. Scout detects current representations. Pilot forecasts shifts and recommends interventions. Flow handles edits at the source level. Merchant, introduced in May, manages product visibility in AI-driven shopping results. Echo runs compliance audits.
The company claims its forecasting models achieve better than 80 percent directional accuracy across more than 300 predictions, according to its announcement. One example offered: a box office forecast for Spider-Man: Brand New Day that came within $8 million of the actual $360 million opening, hitting 98 percent accuracy. Whether that level of precision extends to predicting how ChatGPT will describe a skincare brand remains to be seen.
Underneath sits what emberos calls a proprietary Brand Knowledge Graph, spanning more than 10,000 brands and millions of relationships. The system scores companies using a framework the startup developed called the Tiered AI Visibility Index, which measures ownership, category dominance, and intent expansion across platforms.
Clients Range From Agencies to Snowboarders
Early customers include Stagwell, The Honest Company, RA Capital Management, branding firm Monigle, and WHITESPACE, the brand consultancy founded by professional snowboarder Shaun White. emberos also counts BERO among its clients, according to the announcement.
The most visible partnership runs through Stagwell Search+, an AI-powered search platform built by Stagwell's Assembly unit and launched in March 2026. emberos provides the underlying brand intelligence. That collaboration earned a nod in Adweek's 2026 Tech Stack Awards for search products, announced in August.
The company also teamed with Adweek in February on the Super Bowl AI Influence Index, a real-time tracker showing which advertisers appeared most frequently in AI-generated answers about the game.
"You're managing what machines understand about you, what they believe is true and what they ultimately tell people," founder Justin Inman said in a statement. "Knowing why [ChatGPT] says it is more valuable."
Inman previously held growth and partnership roles at Google, according to profiles on CB Insights and Crunchbase, and worked at creative shops including The Mill and Thinkingbox, plus ad tech firm Cardlytics. The company now employs 17 people, per its LinkedIn page, and brought on David Lewis as head of partnerships in August.
The Money Goes Toward Mapping Influencers
emberos plans to spend the fresh capital on CreatorGraph, an extension of its knowledge system designed to map creators and communities. The goal is identifying which influencers shape what AI platforms recommend about specific brands.
It's a logical next step in a market where discovery increasingly bypasses traditional channels. Matt Adams, global CEO of Stagwell Media Platform, noted in the announcement that "as AI becomes part of how consumers discover, evaluate and choose brands, that intelligence needs to connect into the broader marketing stack." Sonny McCracken, CEO of WHITESPACE, added that shoppers now routinely turn to large language models for guidance.
emberos operates in a space that didn't quite exist two years ago but is filling up quickly. Established SEO platforms BrightEdge and Conductor added AI Overview and generative engine optimization tracking to their tools throughout 2024 and into this year, publishing research on Google's AI-powered results. Academic work on optimizing for generative engines appeared on arXiv in May and July.
Meanwhile, venture capitalists continue pouring money into agentic marketing startups. Gradial, which automates marketing workflows, closed a $65 million Series C in June, Axios reported.
Whether brands will pay sustained subscription fees to manage their reputations inside black-box language models remains an open question. emberos is betting they will, particularly as organic search traffic continues migrating toward conversational AI interfaces that rarely credit their sources.
The company holds SOC 2 Type 1 compliance and operates from El Segundo, California. Its seed investors chose to remain anonymous.
