Home media coverage Gushwork AI secures $9M seed for AI search engine discovery. Feb. 26, 2026 at 2:49 pm Gushwork, an agentic AI startup, has built autonomous marketing agents to increase visibility for businesses on AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude & Perplexity as buyer behaviour fundamentally shifts toward ai-powered search. Over 300+ businesses around the world rely on Gushwork's product to accelerate their growth. Gushwork, an agentic AI startup raised a $9 million seed round led by Susquehanna Asia VC with continued participation from Lightspeed, B Capital, Seaborne Capital, Beenext, Sparrow Capital, and 2.2 Capital. Founded by Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh, Gushwork has built a swarm of complex AI marketing agents to help small and medium businesses get discovered and cited on AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity & Gemini, helping them generate more leads and get new customers. The new funding will enable Gushwork AI to accelerate product development, improve the accuracy of agents, expand engineering teams, and scale go-to-market operations. How buyers are replacing Google search with AI? Buyers are increasingly turning to AI search engines to research services and products. According to data reported by OpenAI, ChatGPT alone now handles over 2.5 billion prompts per day, a shift that is fundamentally changing how businesses are discovered online by their customers. This is an especially urgent challenge for high-ticket businesses in software, manufacturing, distribution, and services, where purchases are heavily research driven. Their buyers are turning to AI search engines before ever speaking with a salesperson, yet most businesses don't know how to get recommended by these AI search engines. Gushwork bridges this gap by making brands discoverable on AI search engines, deploying a swarm of AI marketing agents on customer websites. It is poised to disrupt a massive The product-market fit has been immediate: 80% of Gushwork's customers start seeing a 500% spike in impressions of their website and 50% increase in inbound lead flow within the first 60 days. The company already has over 300+ businesses as customers and 800+ on their waitlist. "Buyers have already started shifting their behaviour, asking AI for vendor opinions instead of salespeople or friends for referrals. By 2028, AI's recommendation will be the primary way buyers choose their vendors," said Nayrhit Bhattacharya, CEO and Co-founder, Gushwork AI. "We've built autonomous AI agents that ensure business' websites get recommended by AI when their buyers ask these questions. This $9M raise and support from an experienced group of investors validates our vision and will help us accelerate our product build and go- to-market velocity." The internet has a new dominant user and it's not human. Every day, AI agents now crawl, consume, and cite web content billions of times per day to answer user queries, transforming the way information is accessed, evaluated, and delivered across digital ecosystems. "For every human visit, we are seeing 2x-3x AI agent visits on our customer websites. This creates a fundamental shift, where a website needs to attract not just human visitors, but AI visitors as well which will analyze and cite the content when answering potential customers' questions," says Adithya Venkatesh, CPO and Co-founder, Gushwork AI. "We have built a data-backed and deeply technical content creation, distribution, and management engine that plugs directly into any website and continuously attracts both AI crawlers and human buyers. Our agents are always adapting and evolving as these AI models, which automatically keep updating every few days, " he explains. "The technical moat lies in understanding how different AI engines evaluate authority, how they cluster topics, and how they decide what to cite." Built from India, for the world. Headquartered in the US with a strong team presence in India, most of the Company's customers are spread across the globe, with a large concentration in the US. Co-founders Nayrhit and Adithya spent the last five years building complex AI products together across industries, equipping them with the technical expertise to reverse-engineer how AI search engines evaluate sources and decide what to cite and to automate the process at scale. India's AI engineering talent pool and robust digital infrastructure stack have made it possible to build a product of this technical sophistication. Gushwork AI is part of a growing wave of Indian AI companies building globally competitive products. Investor perspectives. Sai Araveti, Investment Advisor to Susquehanna Asia VC, said, "Every few decades, a new discovery channel emerges that reshapes how businesses find customers, Yellow Pages, Google, social media. AI search is the next one, and it's moving faster than any before it. What excited us about Gushwork is that they're building the system that owns how a business shows up across every AI engine, end to end, from understanding what AI models look for, to creating the content, to continuously adapting as these models evolve every few weeks. That full-stack ownership is rare and incredibly hard to replicate. We invested because Gushwork is defining the category." "Businesses seek results, not additional tools to manage. Gushwork embodies this shift with AI agents that generate qualified leads continuously, with minimal customer input. The team at Gushwork, experienced in building AI products over the years, has the potential to transform growth journeys for businesses around the world with their agentic platform. This is the kind of innovation we like to back at Lightspeed, and we are excited to be part of their journey," added Rahul Taneja, Partner, Lightspeed.

Indian AI startup Gushwork raises $9m seed round. India-founded startup Gushwork has raised US$9 million in a seed funding round led by Susquehanna International Group and Lightspeed, valuing the company at US$33 million post-money. Founded in 2023, Gushwork develops AI tools to help businesses improve online visibility through search-optimized content, backlinks, and lead tracking. The company has over 300 paying customers, with roughly 95% of them in the US, and an annualized recurring revenue of around US$1.5 million, the startup said. Gushwork's platform uses AI agents to generate and update content, build backlinks, and monitor inbound leads, with some clients reporting increased pipeline growth. Gushwork plans to use the new funds to expand its engineering team, enhance model accuracy, and scale its sales efforts, with over 800 businesses on its waitlist, the company said. Food for thought. Implications, context, and why it matters. ### Gushwork's valuation rests on AI discovery beyond Google * Gushwork builds for a world where people get answers from AI chatbots and other AI tools, rather than scrolling through Google links 1. * The company calls this a move from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to "Answer Engine Optimization" (AEO), with the goal of getting brands into an AI's synthesized response so they do not fade from view 2. * Early customer results back the idea, with AI search and chat bringing about 20% of traffic while generating around 40% of inbound leads, according to co-founder Nayrhit Bhattacharya citing the startup's internal data 1. * Its system supports that approach by auto-publishing 100+ content and landing pages on a customer's website 3. ### AI search can narrow what gets cited across platforms * Gushwork's approach maps to a new kind of marketing where companies aim to appear in traditional search results plus AI-generated answers, without building large in-house marketing teams 1. * The stakes rise because AI search can cluster citations around a small set of outlets, with one dataset finding OpenAI models' top 20 news sources made up 67.3% of all news citations 4. * That pattern raises the risk of losing visibility during buyer research when AI-driven discovery grows 1. * OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity often cite different news sources and follow distinct citation habits, which can force separate tactics for each platform 4. How would you feel if you could no longer use Tech in Asia? Share, tag us, and land on our Wall of!