Brandi AI wins the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough award for best AI Search Visibility Platform of the Year. * Brandi * August 6, 2026 Brandi AI recognized as GEO and AEO category leader over competitors like Profound, Semrush, Evertune, and Otterly. Brandi AI has been named AI Search Visibility Platform of the Year in the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards. The recognition distinguishes Brandi AI in a fast-growing market GEO and AEO market that includes Profound, Semrush, Brandlight, Peec AI, OtterlyAI, and Evertune. For chief marketing officers, public relations leaders, content creators, digital strategists, and brand teams, the award validates Brandi AI's approach to measuring how brands appear, compete, and are characterized in AI-generated answers - and providing prioritized recommendations to improve that visibility. Brandi AI was recognized alongside three other winners in the Answer Engine Optimization category: PR Newswire for AEO Platform of the Year, IgniteX for the AEO Innovation Award, and Stacker as AEO Solution Provider of the Year. Together, the awards reflect the growing importance of technologies that help brands understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated answers. What Is the MarTech Breakthrough award? The MarTech Breakthrough Awards recognize companies, products, and people advancing marketing, advertising, and sales technology. The organization evaluated more than 4,000 nominations from companies in 15 countries for its 2026 program. Brandi AI received the 2026 AI Search Visibility Platform of the Year award for helping enterprises measure and improve their representation across AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. "Brandi AI turns AI visibility from passive monitoring into an actionable marketing discipline," said Steve Johansson, managing director at MarTech Breakthrough. "Brandi AI measures what those tools miss, giving enterprises visibility into this new decision-making layer and showing them a roadmap to improve weaknesses, leverage strengths, tell their story, and win more effectively inside AI-driven discovery." How Does Brandi AI compare with other AI Visibility Platforms? The AI visibility software market includes platforms serving different audiences, with varying capabilities and approaches to measuring AI-generated answers. The following table summarizes how each company publicly describes its platform and capabilities. Table. Comparison of Brandi AI and Leading AI Visibility Platforms by Focus, Coverage, and Capabilities Why did Brandi AI win AI Search Visibility Platform of the Year? AI-generated answers now influence how consumers and business buyers discover companies, compare products, and evaluate vendors. Traditional metrics such as search rankings, website traffic, and media mentions do not fully show whether AI platforms recommend a brand, how they describe it, or which competitors they present as alternatives. Brandi AI addresses that measurement gap by analyzing high-intent questions that buyers ask across multiple AI systems. The platform helps marketing and communications teams understand: * Whether a brand appears in relevant AI-generated answers * How AI systems characterize the brand's strengths and weaknesses * Which competitors receive visibility or recommendations * Which public sources influence AI-generated narratives * Which actions could improve brand visibility and representation Brandi AI's Sentiment Hub analyzes how AI systems characterize a brand's favorability, attributes, strengths, weaknesses, and competitive differentiation. The Competitive Market Universe(TM) shows which companies appear together in AI-generated answers, how their visibility compares, and which narratives may influence recommendations. Unlike a reporting dashboard that only records mentions, Brandi AI provides prioritized recommendations designed to help teams strengthen content, address visibility gaps, and improve the public evidence available to AI systems. What results have Brandi AI customers achieved? Brandi AI customers have achieved up to sevenfold increases in AI visibility within weeks. Greater visibility can strengthen a brand's inclusion in AI-assisted vendor research, product comparisons, and request-for-proposal consideration. The result illustrates why marketing teams need more than a point-in-time count of AI mentions. They need consistent measurement, competitive context, source intelligence, and clear guidance about what to improve. Frequently asked questions about building an AI Visibility strategy. How can a company determine which AI search prompts are most important to monitor? A company should prioritize the questions buyers are most likely to ask while discovering, comparing, and evaluating solutions in its market. Those prompts may address business challenges, product categories, vendor comparisons, pricing, use cases, implementation requirements, and purchase criteria. Brandi AI identifies high-intent prompts and organize them by audience, funnel stage, geography, topic, and competitive relevance so measurement reflects real buyer behavior. How long does it take to improve a brand's visibility in AI-generated answers? The timeline depends on the brand's existing authority, content quality, competitive position, and public evidence. Some companies may see measurable changes within weeks, while broader improvements in citations, sentiment, and recommendation frequency can require several months of coordinated content, public relations, and digital activity. Brandi AI uses insights to prioritize the changes most likely to influence AI-generated answers and track whether those actions produce sustained improvement. What types of third-party sources can strengthen a brand's AI search visibility? Authoritative editorial coverage, analyst commentary, customer reviews, industry directories, partner websites, research reports, comparison articles, and credible user-generated content can all strengthen the evidence available to AI systems. The most valuable sources are relevant, trustworthy, specific, and consistent with the brand's positioning. With Brandi AI, you can see which external sources influence AI-generated narratives and build communications strategies that address evidence gaps. How should companies respond when AI platforms describe their brand inaccurately? Companies should first identify which prompts produce the inaccurate description, how consistently the narrative appears, and which sources may be reinforcing it. The response should focus on correcting the underlying public evidence rather than attempting to change one isolated answer. Brandi AI provides teams with the intelligence needed to trace inaccurate or unfavorable narratives, compare them across AI platforms, and recommend content, messaging, and earned-media actions that strengthen the brand's accurate market position. Why AI Visibility Is becoming a marketing priority. AI answer engines represent a new layer for discovery and decision-making. Buyers can now receive a synthesized list of recommended companies, product comparisons, and assessments without visiting a brand's website or reviewing a traditional page of search results. That change creates several questions for marketing leaders: * Does the brand appear when buyers ask relevant questions? * Is the company described accurately and favorably? * Which competitors receive stronger recommendations? * Which sources are shaping the answer? * What can the organization do to improve its position? Brandi AI gives marketing, public relations, brand, content, and digital teams a structured way to answer those questions and act on the findings. AI-generated answers are now a meaningful part of how buyers discover and evaluate brands, but most marketing technology platforms were not designed to measure that environment. Brandi built Brandi AI to give marketers both the intelligence and the recommendations they need to improve how their brands are represented.

Vaaree, GetVantage, Superleap, others pocket early-stage cheques. * 04 Aug 2026 * Listen to Story Home décor marketplace Vaaree, MSME financing platform GetVantage, artificial intelligence-led customer relationship management (CRM) startup Superleap, agentic AI startup Kily, career platform Profound, legal AI startup Nyai and defence-tech startup Zoppler Systems have raised fresh funding. Curated marketplace for home décor and furnishings Vaaree has raised Rs 65 crore (around $6.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Hero Enterprise and Cap Alpha Ventures. Existing investors, including Peak XV's Surge, PeerCapital, All In Capital, Better Capital, OTP Ventures and Kunal Shah, also backed the company. The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand Vaaree's fulfilment network, speed up deliveries and strengthen its AI powered home styling and product discovery platform, VibeCheck. Founded in 2022 by Garima Vohra and Varun Vohra, Bengaluru-based Vaaree operates a curated marketplace for home décor, furnishings, kitchenware, lighting and other home products. The platform partners with a select group of manufacturers and brands, focusing on quality and design. A fintech platform focussed on MSME financing GetVantage has raised Rs 63 crore (around $6.6 million) in a Series A round through a mix of equity and debt. The round was anchored by banking veteran Rajeev Ahuja and operator-led investment firm SanRaj Group, with participation from existing investors Chiratae Ventures, Varanium Fintech Fund and VCMint. The fresh capital will expand the company's committed financing capacity beyond Rs 700 crore and strengthen its embedded financing platform. Founded by Bhavik Vasa, Mumbai-based GetVantage provides cash flow based financing, term loans, business loans and merchant cash advances to small businesses. The company said it will use the funds to scale its Capital Gateway, an API-based platform that enables marketplaces, B2B e-commerce platforms and logistics companies to offer embedded financing to merchants. Enterprise AI CRM platform Superleap has raised Rs 36 crore (around $3.8 million) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Peak XV's Surge. The company plans to use the capital to expand its enterprise go-to-market efforts, strengthen its AI-native CRM platform and accelerate product development. Founded in 2024 by former Unacademy executives Subham Kumar Boundia, Alok Maurya and Saurabh Maheshwari, Superleap helps enterprises replace legacy CRM systems with an AI-native platform. The startup, which counts Razorpay, Aakash Education, MediBuddy, HCL GUVI, Cars24, PagarBook, Plum, Qube Cinema and Superhealth among its customers, said it has grown 10-fold over the past year. Kily, an agentic enterprise AI startup, has raised Rs 30 crore (around $3.1 million) in a funding round led by Sorin Investments, with participation from Razorpay and Wyser Capital. The company will use the capital to strengthen its product capabilities, expand go-to-market efforts and accelerate adoption among large consumer brands. Founded in 2025 by Sankalp Mehrotra, Anurag Singh and Sharad Chitlangia, Kily develops AI agents that automate commerce operations and decision-making for brands across e-commerce and quick commerce platforms. The startup counts companies including ITC among its customers and helps brands manage operations across marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart. AI-native professional networking and career platform Profound has raised $1.5 million (around Rs 14.3 crore) in a seed funding round from Stellaris Venture Partners, 3one4 Capital and a group of individual investors including Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy co-founder Nandan Reddy, former Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur, WhatsApp global head Kunal Shah and OfBusiness co-founder Bhuvan Gupta. The company will use the capital to expand its engineering and product teams, strengthen its AI capabilities and develop its AI powered matching platform. Founded by former Swiggy and Zomato executives Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar, Profound is building an AI-native platform that provides professionals with an AI representative to help identify career opportunities, facilitate introductions and build professional relationships. Nyai, an AI-native legal technology startup, has raised $1.5 million (around Rs 14 crore) in a seed funding round from a consortium of Indian family offices, with participation from strategic individual investors. The Pune-based company will use the fresh capital to expand its proprietary Indian legal corpus, strengthen its AI-powered compliance platform, and accelerate deployments across enterprises, law firms and regulated entities. Founded in 2025 by Adv. Dr. Chinmay Bhosale and Vikrant Labde, Nyai provides an AI-native legal infrastructure platform designed for Indian enterprises.

Ex-Swiggy, Zomato executives launch AI startup Profound, raise $1.5 mn. Profound helps users find career opportunities, make introductions and connect with employers. (L-R) Anuj Rathi, Co-Founder and CEO and Prashant Parashar, Co-Founder and CTO, Profound Former Swiggy and Zomato executives Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar have launched Profound, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to give every professional an AI-powered representative. The company said it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding and opened early access to its first group of users after several months of product development and customer research. Rathi and Parashar bring more than two decades of experience building consumer products, growth systems and technology platforms used by millions of people. The seed round saw participation from technology founders and entrepreneurs, including Swiggy Cofounders Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy; Zomato Cofounder Pankaj Chaddah and Razorpay Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Cofounder Harshil Mathur. Other investors include Kunal Shah, global head, WhatsApp; and Bhuvan Gupta, cofounder, OfBusiness. The round also included institutional participation from Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital. The company will use the funding to strengthen its engineering and product teams, expand its AI capabilities and accelerate development of its matching and introductions engine. Over the next year, Profound plans to build its founding network and onboard 1 million professionals globally ahead of a broader beta rollout. "Just as actors have agents and athletes have managers, Profound gives each professional their own AI Rep," said Rathi, cofounder and CEO, Profound. "It learns your work and your judgment, and keeps you ready for the next move and the connection that has the potential to change your career trajectory. This is what the future of work looks like when representation is available to everyone." At Profound, every professional receives an AI Rep that begins with a 30-minute voice conversation. It develops a continuously evolving understanding of a person's experience, expertise, judgment, working style, ambitions and context. The AI Rep works in the background on behalf of professionals, identifies relevant opportunities, facilitates meaningful introductions and helps build stronger professional relationships and careers. Parashar, cofounder and chief technology officer, said voice AI has reached a point where a machine can hold a genuinely curious conversation. "We built the reasoning layer that turns those conversations into an AI Rep," he said. "That richer understanding of a professional enables significantly better matches, shifting professional discovery from keyword-based search to intelligence-driven matchmaking," he said. Profound also enables hiring managers to create AI Reps for roles and teams. Through natural conversations, founders and hiring leaders can capture far deeper context than a conventional job description, enabling more accurate talent discovery, stronger matches, meaningful introductions and more effective collaboration. Rahul Chowdhri, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners, said there is a growing gap between how good someone is at their job and how easy they are to find. "Resumes and LinkedIn profiles capture titles, not judgment," said Chowdhri. "Profound uses a voice-first, AI-native approach to build an always-on 'AI Rep' that represents professionals with far greater depth. We are excited to back the team as they build the professional OS for the AI era." Pranav Pai, managing partner at 3one4 Capital, said the biggest constraint in hiring today is not the supply of talent but the ability to verify fit. "Resumes and static profiles cannot capture judgment, working style or real context," said Pai. "Profound is rebuilding that layer for an AI-first world, and we are backing the team as they redefine how professionals are understood and matched." Profound is now available through an early-access programme for its first cohort, with broader beta access planned later this year. Looking ahead, the company envisions a professional ecosystem where AI Reps interact with one another on behalf of individuals and organisations. This enables richer discovery, trusted introductions, and new ways to build careers, teams, and businesses.