Enterprise Strategy Analyst

Unveilr AI raises pre-seed from AJVC at ₹16.7 cr valuation. Unveilr AI has raised pre-seed funding from AJVC at a ₹16.7 crore valuation. The amount was undisclosed, but AJVC's standard ₹1.5 crore for 9% divides to exactly that number. Unveilr AI, a Mumbai company that tries to get brands named inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude answers, has raised pre-seed funding from Aviral Bhatnagar's AJVC at a ₹16.7 crore valuation. The amount was not disclosed. It is, however, derivable. AJVC's standard pre-seed deal is ₹1.5 crore for 9%, and ₹1.5 crore at 9% implies a post-money valuation of ₹16.67 crore. That is the ₹16.7 crore figure, to the decimal. The pattern holds across the portfolio too: Multibagg AI, Mindcase and Slayd each raised exactly ₹1.5 crore from the same fund. So this is almost certainly a ₹1.5 crore cheque on house terms. That matters because it sets the altitude. AJVC closed its maiden fund at ₹200 crore and writes roughly the same cheque into every company, which makes it a volume business: 25 to 35 companies in, a target of around 90 over the fund's life, and a founder who ran enterprise software and AI investing at Venture Highway before setting up on his own. Being backed by AJVC is a signal about stage, not about a bespoke conviction bet. Answer engine optimisation exists because an AI answer behaves differently from a results page. Ten blue links give a brand a chance at position seven; an AI answer names two or three companies and stops. Everyone else is invisible, not merely further down. That is a genuine structural change in how buyers shortlist, and it has produced a real market in under two years. It is also a market with a very expensive top end. Profound raised a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed, with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins participating, at a $1 billion valuation, making it the category's first unicorn. Peec AI, founded in Berlin in early 2025, has raised about $30 million across seed and Series A. AthenaHQ has raised $2.7 million. Meanwhile Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz have all built or bought AI visibility features, and Adobe, Salesforce and HubSpot are folding the capability into their platforms. Unveilr enters that at a valuation of roughly $1.9 million. Read quickly, that gap looks fatal. Read properly, it is a different business. Profound and Peec sell software: a dashboard, a subscription, no humans in the loop. Unveilr pairs its own agents with SEO and AEO specialists who then write the content and do the technical work, and it measures itself on leads delivered rather than on visibility scores. That is an agency with proprietary tooling, and agencies are priced on people rather than on revenue multiples. A ₹16.7 crore valuation for an eight-month-old services business is unremarkable, where the same number attached to a SaaS platform trying to catch Profound would be nonsense. The two companies are not really competing for the same thing, which is the point most coverage of this category keeps missing. The open question is which one it intends to become. Services revenue is real revenue and it arrives early, but it scales with headcount and it does not compound the way a software subscription does. The founder's own stated thesis is about compounding. What the company says it has done. Unveilr reports that for an Indian B2B legal services platform it lifted AI-sourced traffic about 4.7 times and leads five times, with roughly 80% more ChatGPT citations, and that for one direct-to-consumer brand organic search now drives about 27% of total revenue. Neither customer is named and neither figure is independently verifiable, which is the normal state of agency case studies rather than a mark against these ones. The company says customers typically see movement inside the first month. "A buyer today asks ChatGPT which lawyer, clinic or software to choose and gets two or three names back. If a brand isn't one of them, it has lost that lead before its website ever loads," said Sanditya Srivastava, founder and chief executive. "Referrals and paid campaigns bring in customers, but they don't compound. Organic visibility does." Aviral Bhatnagar framed the investment around usage inside his own portfolio. "Unveilr's strong adoption in our large AJVC portfolio is a sign of its general-purpose utility," he said. There is something concrete behind that: Multibagg, an AJVC company that raised its own ₹1.5 crore from the fund, sits among the customer logos on Unveilr's site alongside LexComply, Advarisk and Caredale. It is also a bounded signal, because a fund's portfolio companies are a friendly first market and adoption there is easier to win than adoption outside it. Where it goes next. The money funds engineering capacity to widen what the agents do, and a bigger sales team covering India, the UAE and the United States. The company launched in February 2026, which makes it roughly eight months old, and says its team combines IIT alumni with SEO and AEO specialists. It has been named company of the year in AI search by siliconindia and listed in Inc42's startups to watch. For anyone tracking this space, the useful comparison is not Unveilr against Profound. It is whether the Indian, UAE and US mid-market will pay for execution rather than dashboards, in a category where the tooling is commoditising fast and the incumbents are bundling it in free. The services layer is the part software cannot copy quickly. It is also the part that gets squeezed when visibility tracking becomes a checkbox inside a platform a brand already pays for. Plenty of Indian operators are already selling this service without a fund behind them, which tells you the demand is real and the barrier to entry is not. What ₹1.5 crore buys is a head start on turning that service into a product, and roughly eighteen months to prove it, which is what this year's funding data suggests a pre-seed now has to show before anyone writes the next cheque.

Ascensus appoints John Shapiro as Chief Product Officer. Sep 22, 2026, 12:00 ET Experienced product leader to help strengthen client-centered innovation and advance the company's next phase of growth DRESHER, Pa., Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Ascensus, the engine at the center of America's savings ecosystem, today announced that John Shapiro has joined the company as Chief Product Officer and a member of the executive leadership team. Reporting directly to CEO Nick Good, Shapiro will shape Ascensus' enterprise-wide product vision and strengthen how the company develops and delivers products, makes decisions, and sets priorities across the business. As Ascensus continues to enhance the client experience and position the company for its next phase of growth, strong product leadership will play an increasingly important role in helping connect client insights, business priorities, and technology to create more integrated solutions and better outcomes. Shapiro will lead the Product organization and help foster unified, client-focused, and outcome-oriented approaches to product development across the enterprise. "Ascensus has tremendous momentum, and we're investing in the capabilities that will help drive our next phase of growth," said Nick Good, CEO of Ascensus. "Delivering an exceptional client experience is central to that strategy. We want to make it easier for clients and partners to do business with us while creating more connected solutions and better outcomes. John brings a powerful combination of client focus, product leadership, and business acumen, and I'm excited about the impact he will have as we continue to grow and evolve." "Ascensus stands out for its clear purpose, talented team, and unique position in the market," said John Shapiro. "I'm thrilled to join the company at such an important time and help build on its strong foundation by creating solutions and experiences that deliver greater value for clients, partners, and savers." Shapiro joins Ascensus from Lightspeed Commerce, where he served as Chief Product Officer. Earlier in his career, he held product leadership roles at Wayfair, Intuit, and Adobe Systems. Throughout his career, he has built and led large-scale product organizations, bringing new ideas to market and helping businesses serving millions of users accelerate growth. Shapiro earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stanford University. About Ascensus Ascensus is the engine at the center of America's savings ecosystem. The company makes saving easier by bringing together intuitive technology, AI, and high-touch service to support better financial outcomes for savers, small- to mid-sized businesses, state governments, and leading corporations and financial institutions. Ascensus offers comprehensive qualified and nonqualified retirement plan solutions, third-party retirement plan administration, 529 education and ABLE savings program administration, corporate- and bank-owned life insurance solutions, as well as fiduciary and total rewards services. The company supports over 16 million savers[1] and oversees more than $1.3 trillion in assets under administration[2] as of August 3, 2026. For more information, visit ascensus.com. [1] Figure includes American Trust Retirement recordkeeping participants [2] Figure includes AmericanTCS AUA SOURCE Ascensus

Lightspeed DMS real-time inventory sync. Dealer Spike and Lightspeed have built the first real-time connection in the Lightspeed ecosystem between your DMS and your website, so your digital showroom stays accurate down to the minute. Real-time inventory sync means your website never lags behind your active showroom. The old way: a unit arrives in back Tuesday morning and doesn't show up on your site until the next overnight batch update, so a customer who would have called about it today calls somewhere else instead. Or a unit sells and stays live online for another day, taking calls on something that's already gone. That gap exists because most websites check inventory once a day, sometimes less, and today's shopper won't wait until tomorrow to see if a unit is still there. The new way: Dealer Spike and Lightspeed built a webhook to achieve a real-time connection that closes that gap entirely. A traditional integration relies on your website periodically checking in with the DMS to ask if anything changed. A webhook flips that: instead of your site asking, Lightspeed tells your site when something happens. Already on Lightspeed? This is already headed your way. If you have an existing parts and unit inventory 3PA key, real-time sync is rolling out to you automatically at no additional cost. Nothing to set up on your end. Want to be among the first to get it? Sign up here. Not on Lightspeed yet? Here's why dealers are making the move. Within the Lightspeed ecosystem, Dealer Spike is the first website partner to offer a real-time DMS sync like this, keeping your inventory accurate within minutes instead of once a day. If your site still runs on daily batch updates, ask your Dealer Spike account team what switching to Lightspeed would mean for you. Dealer Spike is the first website provider to offer this real-time sync. Ted Kerkam, Lightspeed's Director of Product Management, put it simply on the What's New at Dealer Spike webinar: Dealer Spike is the first website provider to partner with Lightspeed on this. That's worth pausing on. Lightspeed runs the DMS behind more than 4,500 dealers across powersports, marine, RV, and golf, and a real-time connection into a system that central takes real cooperation, engineering time, and trust from the DMS partner, not something a website provider ships alone. Andy Korolenko, Dealer Spike's Senior Manager of Partnerships, sees the same pattern in nearly every integration he works on: The biggest thing I see with integrations is the constant request for faster updates. It's always, 'Great, Dealer Spike has got once-a-day updates - how do Dealer Spike get to every three hours? How do Dealer Spike get to once an hour?' Real-time skips past all of that." Andy Korolenko, Senior Manager, Partnerships, Dealer Spike Very few partnerships have the resources to make that leap directly. Getting there took two things being true at once: Lightspeed having the technical depth to build something this capable, and enough shared dealers to justify the investment on both sides. That overlap is real: 70% of Dealer Spike customers with a DMS integration run Lightspeed, backed by years of partnership between its teams. You can read more about the full partnership on its Better Together page. Here's exactly what changes for your inventory. Ted explained it plainly on the webinar: Webhooks removes the polling and creates a real-time integration between Dealer Spike and Lightspeed. Take receipt of a unit and load it into Lightspeed, and it shows up on your website immediately. Sell a unit, and it comes down immediately, at no additional cost for Lightspeed customers with an existing 3PA key. Once enabled, it runs itself: Once webhooks are enabled, they actively scan for changes in the dealer inventory and make sure that those get posted. So you can always manually push if you want to, but Webhooks will be sort of the always-on solution for inventory updating online." Ted Kerkam, Director of Product Management, Lightspeed That accuracy pays off beyond your leads, too. Search engines and AI assistants increasingly favor sites with current, accurate listings, and treat outdated inventory as a signal to rank lower. A site that reflects real inventory in real time has a real edge over a competitor whose listings lag a day behind. Real-time sync is rolling out now - don't wait to get started. Sign up below to lock in first access. What's coming next. Real-time inventory sync is the biggest thing Dealer Spike and Lightspeed have shipped together so far, but it's not the last. Next up is a text widget that captures sales, parts, service, and rental leads directly into your Lightspeed CRM, with no double entry and no new number to manage since it runs on your existing Twilio account. It's still in development, targeted for general availability this summer. That's one piece of a longer list of projects the two teams are working through together. As Andy puts it, "There's just so much in the works right now." See the full partnership. Watch Ted Kerkam and its team cover both real-time sync and a preview of the upcoming text widget live in the webinar.