Sami Akkawi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Petra Labs, a New York-based enterprise platform helping brands manage and measure their presence across AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

Sami spent five years at Strategy& advising private equity firms across more than 50 acquisitions in marketing data, technology, and services, conducting nearly 1,000 interviews with senior marketing leaders at major brands like Nike and Pepsi.

Through his consulting work, Sami identified a critical market gap: enterprise brands had no credible way to connect AI search visibility to actual revenue, prompting him to leave his private equity consulting career to build Petra Labs.

Sami co-founded Petra Labs alongside CTO Rishi Penmetcha and COO Ramie Khoury, and led the company to close a $5.2M Seed round led by Work-Bench, with participation from Afore Capital and Pathlight.

Petra Labs embeds directly into enterprise clients' data and attribution environments, using large-scale simulations and agentic analysis to turn AI search from a black box into a measurable, optimizable growth channel for brands.