Searchable Raises €4.5 Million To Help Brands In The AI Era

The round was led by early-stage investor Freestyle VC. This comes as many big UK brands start moving away from traditional US platforms and focusing on AI-first marketing.

“AI is changing marketing faster than Google did,” says founder Chris Donnelly, a serial entrepreneur behind Verb and Lottie. “We’re no longer optimising for humans. We’re optimising for the platforms that talk to humans.”

“The way consumers search has changed drastically in the past year and AEO has emerged as a defining consumer category”, says Maria Palma, General Partner at Freestyle VC lead investor in the round. “While we have seen some companies start to innovate in AI marketing, the team at Searchable has the leading analytics tool but more importantly a recommendation engine that shows brands how to take hold of this opportunity.”

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Searchable was founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneur Chris Donnelly. The company offers a tool that shows marketing teams how their brand appears, ranks, and is recommended by AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. This is important as AI-generated answers start to replace traditional link-based search results.

The platform tracks brand visibility across these AI engines and provides clear steps to improve it such as rewriting content or optimizing metadata. It works like an AI marketing assistant. Searchable also integrates with Google Analytics and Search Console letting marketers ask simple questions like “Which AI models recommend us?” or “Where are we losing visibility?”

In its invite-only soft launch, the startup made six figures in recurring revenue within 24 hours, with global clients switching from established US competitors. Early clients have seen results like a 40% boost in AI visibility and a 50% drop in manual SEO work.

Chris Donnelly, 35, has a track record of building successful digital companies. His first, Verb Brands, started as a student project with just €455 (£400) and a laptop, later growing into a luxury digital agency for clients like Bugatti and Jimmy Choo. He sold it in 2021 in an eight-figure deal. He then co-founded Lottie, a HealthTech platform for eldercare, which reached a €284 million (£250 million) valuation in three years.

With Searchable, Donnelly is now targeting what he sees as the next big shift in marketing: AI-driven search. The company was built in just 60 days and aims to be the go-to platform for AI Search Engine Optimisation (AEO).

“It’s the new front door to the internet,” says Donnelly. “If you’re not indexed, you don’t exist.”

AI search is expected to become a multi-billion-euro market by 2030, with projections of €30–50 billion in new value creation. Searchable is betting that brands will need help adapting quickly to this change.

The company plans to add features like predictive modeling and automated AI training to keep brands visible and performing well in AI search results.

Donnelly compares the moment to the early Facebook ad days. ““In 2012, £10 in Facebook spend could return hundreds because no one else was doing it,” he says. “That same window exists now for brands who learn to be visible to AI.”