Optimly raises $800K pre-seed to help brands shape what AI says about them
What's the deal? Seattle startup OptimlyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has closed an $800,000 pre-seed round to build a public index that lets brands correct what AI chatbots say about them. Flywheel Angel Network, Mighty CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, AI HouseDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and ai2 incubatorDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → backed the round, which was announced in July 2026.
The problem: AI models rarely learn about a brand from its own website. They read Wikipedia, Reddit, reviews, and analyst write-ups, then synthesise a response when shoppers ask about a company or product.
The product: Optimly runs two connected products. The free AI Brand Index is a public directory that AI agents can pull from — it has scored about 60,000 brands, with more than 24,000 now live. BrandVault, the paid layer, lets a verified brand rewrite its entry in plain language an agent can parse, then monitors how AI describes it.
Why now? "Shoppers used to Google — now they ask AI," said founder and chief executive officer Apurva Luty. The index now gets about 11,000 agent requests a week, up from 4,000 weeks earlier.
How it caught on: Optimly started with an index of about 200 brands as an experiment, and AI agents swarmed it. OpenAI sent three kinds of bots — one crawling for training data, one building its own index, and one pulling live answers for users. AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s Claude also started pulling from the index in 2026.
The backstory: Luty founded Optimly in October 2025 after a decade in consumer insights and product strategy. She worked on the Surface launch at Microsoft, led product marketing insights for Quest at Meta, and headed UX research at Discord.
How the round came together: Optimly entered the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Washington, in May 2026 as a last-minute entrant and won a $150,000 investment, a $50,000 relocation offer, and a $5,000 fan-favourite prize. "The funny thing about winning at Flywheel is that it got us noticed by Seattle investors," Luty said. That $150,000 from Flywheel Angel Network became part of the broader pre-seed round.
What could go wrong? The major AI companies are each building their own private brand indexes that don't talk to one another. Optimly is betting it can be the public, verified alternative — but it depends on those same players continuing to pull from its data.
The signal: As shoppers shift from search engines to chatbots, a new category is forming around managing how AI describes brands. Optimly's early traction — and the interest from OpenAI and Anthropic — suggests demand for a shared, verified layer between companies and the models now speaking on their behalf.
Read more: GeekWire
