Seattle startup Optimly has raised an $800,000 pre-seed round to help brands manage how AI chatbots describe them. Investors include Flywheel Angel Network, Mighty Capital, and AI House. The company built a public AI Brand Index where brands can claim and correct information that chatbots use when shoppers ask about products. Optimly's paid BrandVault service lets companies rewrite their entries and monitors how AI systems respond. Founder Apurva Luty launched the company in October 2024 after working on product strategy at Microsoft, Meta, and Discord. The index now receives about 11,000 AI agent requests weekly, up from 4,000 recently. Over 100 brands have claimed profiles since launch this spring. Brands pay monthly subscriptions ranging from $100 to $799. Optimly previously raised $100,000 from Right Side Capital Management and Forum Ventures.

Devplan emerges from stealth with $2.5M to build the intelligence layer for product and engineering organizations. Jun 18, 2026, 11:00 ET Backed by AI2, the company is building the product intelligence layer that helps teams and AI agents stay aligned as software development accelerates SEATTLE, June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ - Devplan, the intelligence layer for AI-native product development, today emerged from stealth and announced $2.5 million in seed funding led by AI2 Incubator, with participation from Acequia Capital, Mighty Capital, Grand Ventures, and eLab Ventures. Founded in 2025 by Chris Bee and Anton Safonov, veterans of Uber, Amazon, Snap and Facebook, the company will use the capital to accelerate product development, engineering hiring and early customer deployments. AI-assisted software development has dramatically increased the speed at which teams can build and ship products. But while software creation has accelerated, coordination has not. Product and engineering teams are still spending countless hours gathering context, tracking progress, aligning, and communicating decisions across an increasingly fragmented set of tools. Recent reports estimate that this fragmentation costs Fortune 500 companies $161 billion annually. Devplan is the intelligence layer for AI-native product development. Its product intelligence engine, Weaver, connects tools like GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack, Notion, Google Workspace, meeting notes and customer feedback into a shared organizational knowledge graph. By providing the right context to both people and AI agents, Devplan replaces manual status reporting and fragmented workflows with a real-time understanding of what changed, what's at risk, and what needs attention. The result is faster decisions, fewer meetings, and better alignment across the organization. "After two decades leading product and engineering teams, I watched talented people lose half their week to coordination work that never resulted in a customer-facing update," said Chris Bee, co-founder and CEO of Devplan. "AI made code generation fast and cheap but internal alignment remains time-intensive and expensive. The answer isn't another dashboard or another meeting. It's an AI-native coordination layer that knows what's happening, surfaces what matters, and sends the right information to the right people before they have to ask." In a survey of early users, product managers reported saving 8 hours per week that had previously been spent on coordination work. Additionally, internal benchmarking against a standard Claude configuration with GitHub connected via MCP showed that a moderately complex product-context query took 6 minutes and 20 seconds and cost $1.75. With Devplan's MCP integration, the same query completed in 2 minutes and 56 seconds at a cost of $0.54, 2x faster and more than 3.5x cheaper. Devplan's knowledge graph continuously maintains product and organizational context, so Devplan agent queries return product-focused, context-aware summaries rather than just an aggregation of data sources. "In the last 6 months, AI got really good at generating code, but that has implications for non-engineering teams," said Yifan Zhang, managing director at AI2 Incubator. "Status updates, stale roadmaps, outdated requirements, alignment meetings, not to mention token costs all compound as code execution speeds up, and that's the opportunity for Devplan. Chris and Anton have lived this problem at scale, and they have the technical depth to solve it. This is the kind of foundational, real-world bet we make at AI2 Incubator." Devplan is already in production with Axiad, an identity security company and dozens of other fast-growing companies where the platform connects engineering, product, and customer feedback signals into a single understanding of the product. The seed funding will support expanded engineering hiring, deeper integrations across the software development ecosystem, and additional partnerships with product and engineering organizations adopting AI-native workflows. Devplan is hiring across engineering and go-to-market, and is actively partnering with leaders at AI-forward scaleups who want to see the next level of gains from their AI investments. About Devplan Devplan is the intelligence layer for AI-native product development. Its product intelligence engine, Weaver, connects the tools teams already use into an organization-wide knowledge graph. Instead of status meetings and stale roadmaps, product leaders get a real-time personalized picture of what changed, what's at risk, and where to focus next. Based in Seattle, the company was founded in 2025 by Chris Bee and Anton Safonov to help product and engineering leaders streamline software development and product management in the AI era. Learn more at devplan.com. Media Contact BAM by BIG on behalf of, Devplan, 1 2533031217, [email protected] SOURCE Devplan