The Prompting Company, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding to help brands secure visibility in AI-generated product recommendations as consumers rely more on chatbots and large language models for shopping guidance.
According to a new report, U.S. shoppers are expected to shift from Google and traditional search engines to AI-driven assistants this holiday season, with retailers potentially seeing a 520% surge in traffic from AI chatbots in 2025 compared to this year.
This changing behaviour is changing online discovery and forcing brands to adapt quickly.
Founded just four months ago by Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline, and Albert Punama, The Prompting Company is leveraging a marketing approach it calls Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), a method designed to ensure products appear in AI search responses and agent-driven browsing.
“Over the past year, most of the growth on websites has come from AI bots, not people,” said co-founder and CEO Chandra. “We’re already seeing developers ask AI tools for product recommendations inside their workflows, and we think people, over time, will be less involved in parts of the purchasing funnel.”
The company argues that the future of digital marketing will involve optimising for both humans and AI agents. As conversational systems begin to execute transactions on users’ behalf, brands may need to maintain separate, AI-focused websites, stripped of pop-ups, navigation menus, and marketing copy, to provide agents with structured, machine-readable information.
“Most businesses still design websites only for humans,” Chandra added. “But the fastest-growing segment of users on the internet today is AI agents and they need a completely different interface.”
The platform identifies what kinds of questions AI models are asking, especially those related to purchase intent, then creates thousands of structured, “AI-optimised” pages to ensure those models can access and cite brand information directly, even when the company’s main site doesn’t appear in traditional search rankings.
While search engine optimisation (SEO) remains relevant, The Prompting Company insists GEO will soon take precedence, as AI-generated results depend more on contextual relevance than keyword bidding or ranking positions.
“Imagine you’re a large e-commerce store. Users can buy items, make returns, compare products, or search for promotions. We help our customers expose those actions to AI agents. Right now, these agents aren’t yet clicking those options or accessing APIs directly, but we expect that to change in the coming months,” said Chandra.
“Once that becomes widespread and attribution improves, we see a path toward more advertising- or conversion-driven models. For now, we’re focused on helping companies get discovered and recommended by AI.”
The company already lists Rippling, Rho, Motion, Vapi, Fondo, Kernel, and Traceloop among its clients and reportedly hosts around half a million pages for customers. Its client sites now attract double-digit millions in monthly traffic, with revenue generated through subscriptions based on the number of prompts tracked and hosted pages.
The three Indonesian-born founders previously co-created Typedream (YC W20), a website builder acquired by Beehiiv in June, and Cotter, a passwordless authentication tool acquired by Stytch.
Their latest venture builds on that foundation, targeting the next phase of online discovery in the age of AI assistants.
Investors in the round include Peak XV Partners, Base10, Y Combinator, Firedrop, and several angel backers such as Logan Kilpatrick. The company also confirmed it is collaborating with NVIDIA to develop new AI search capabilities.
“If your product isn’t discovered or cited in ChatGPT, you’re ngmi,” said Arnav Sahu, partner at Peak XV Partners. “We’re thrilled to back The Prompting Company as they build the core infrastructure for product discovery—already powering Fortune 10 companies and fast-growing startups. Kevin, Michelle, and Albert are repeat YC founders, and they are awesome.”
The Prompting Company says the fresh capital will be used to expand its partnerships, strengthen its platform, and prepare for a future where AI-driven discovery changes how consumers interact with brands online.
