A two-year-old performance marketing company with offices split between New York and London has closed $14 million in fresh funding to bet that brand discovery is migrating away from traditional search engines and toward AI assistants. Searchable announced the round on May 18, with global venture capital firm Headline leading the investment at an $85 million valuation. The story behind the raise is one of the more aggressive early-revenue trajectories in the current enterprise software cycle, and it lands in a category that most chief marketing officers have only recently started to take seriously.
Searchable’s premise is straightforward. Consumer search behavior is shifting toward AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s own AI overviews, which now appear in roughly half of all Google searches. When an AI assistant directly recommends a product or service, the customer arrives with higher purchase intent and a shorter path to checkout than a traditional ten-blue-links experience produces. Brands that are invisible inside this new discovery layer face the prospect of demand simply not arriving. Searchable sells the execution layer that helps marketers track visibility across ten AI engines, surface insights through interactive agents, and translate data into actions that drive traffic.
A Growth Curve That Caught Investor Attention
The funding follows a stretch of early traction that compressed years of typical SaaS growth into a few months. Searchable launched its free beta in November 2025 and opened paid accounts publicly in January 2026. By the time the round closed, the company had crossed $2 million in annual recurring revenue and signed more than 500 paying customers — including American Express, Siemens, Pfizer, Tencent, Boston Consulting Group, DigitalOcean, Havas, and KPMG. The Pulse2 funding report put the customer count at closer to 1,000 by mid-May.
Founder Chris Donnelly is a British serial entrepreneur with two prior exits in the category-adjacent space. He sold SEO agency Verb for $25 million and helped scale Lottie Org to a nine-figure valuation before launching Searchable in 2025. The pattern in his commentary on the raise has been less about the funding itself and more about how quickly the underlying market is repricing. Writing on the company’s blog, Donnelly described the speed of the AI search transition as unlike anything he had encountered in previous ventures.
Why Headline Wrote the Check
Headline’s participation is the part of the round that signals where investor conviction is forming. The firm’s portfolio includes Bumble, Farfetch, Goop, and Sonos, but the most relevant comparison sits inside the SEO category itself. Headline was an early backer of Semrush, the search optimization software company that Adobe acquired in a $1.9 billion deal. The firm watched a decade-long search optimization market mature, exit, and now sees a structurally similar opportunity unfolding inside AI-driven discovery.
Dominic Wilhelm, the Headline partner who led the round, framed the thesis in stark terms. The job of search engine optimization and marketing teams has grown harder as more discovery surfaces emerge, and the next-generation category will not be a Semrush clone built for AI engines. It will be agentic tooling that does the work for marketing teams rather than handing them another dashboard. That framing helps explain why Headline backed a company with under five months of paid revenue history at an $85 million valuation. The agentic-execution thesis also tracks with broader shifts inside the marketing technology stack, where platforms like Juma’s AI workspace for marketing teams are building toward ready-to-deploy assets rather than dashboards that hand marketers a list of recommendations to execute themselves.
The New York Angle
Searchable’s New York footprint is part of a broader pattern of transatlantic AI startups choosing to operate from the city rather than picking a single headquarters. The press release was datelined New York, the company maintains a U.S. office in the city, and a significant share of its enterprise customer base sits inside the financial services, consulting, and consumer brand companies that anchor Manhattan’s commercial economy. The company is incorporated in Delaware and operates across both New York and London, with growth plans focused on accelerating product development and expanding presence in both the U.S. and U.K. markets.
The funding lands during a stretch of strong NYC AI startup activity. The week ending May 16 saw sixteen New York-headquartered startups close more than $402.5 million in fresh capital, with the largest checks going to health tech, cybersecurity, and AI-native enterprise applications. Searchable’s round joined that flow on May 18, extending the cadence into the following week.
What the Round Says About the Marketing Stack
The structural argument behind Searchable’s funding is hard to dismiss. AI-enabled search is projected to reach roughly 70 percent consumer penetration by 2027, according to industry forecasts cited in the company’s funding materials. For chief marketing officers at consumer brands, that timeline is not theoretical. Performance marketing budgets that have spent fifteen years optimizing against Google’s ranking algorithms now face a parallel optimization problem against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini — engines that surface brands differently, weight authority signals differently, and reward content structures that the prior generation of SEO tooling was not built to produce.
Searchable plans to use the new capital to accelerate development of its execution engine and expand commercial operations across both the U.S. and U.K. markets. Whether the company’s early customer momentum holds through scaling — and whether Headline’s bet on agentic execution proves more durable than dashboard-based competitors — will be the next questions to watch. For now, the round reads as one of the cleaner signals that AI search optimization is moving from a category founders talk about into one investors are actively pricing.
