Gushwork Secures $9 Million to Help Businesses Win in the New AI Search Era

As AI chatbots and search tools become the first stop for many customers, a new front in the battle for online visibility has opened. Gushwork, a startup founded in India in 2023, is positioning itself as a guide for companies navigating this shift. The company announced a $9 million seed funding round on Thursday, led by Susquehanna International Group and Lightspeed, bringing its total capital raised to $11 million and valuing the firm at $33 million.

Gushwork’s premise is straightforward: with platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity answering user queries directly, businesses need a new strategy to be found. The company’s platform deploys automated marketing agents to create optimized content, build backlinks through a network of partner sites, and track incoming leads. The goal is to secure placement in both traditional search results and the summaries generated by AI tools.

Co-founders Nayrhit Bhattacharya and Adithya Venkatesh initially built a service to help small businesses outsource workflows. Customer demand, however, steered them toward search marketing. 'The pull from customers became impossible to ignore,' Bhattacharya said.

The early results are compelling. Since launching its AI-search product three months ago, Gushwork has reached $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue and is adding 300 paying clients, most in the U.S. For these customers, roughly 20% of website traffic now originates from AI platforms, but that traffic generates 40% of all sales leads. In one case, a professional services firm landed contracts worth between $200,000 and $350,000 after using Gushwork’s service.

The startup, which employs about 70 people in India, plans to use the new capital to grow its engineering team and refine its technology. With a waitlist of over 800 businesses, Gushwork is betting that the way companies get discovered online has fundamentally changed.

Source: TechCrunch