The Prompting Company is a Y Combinator-backed AI visibility startup that helps software brands get found, cited and correctly used by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Peak XV Partners, reported in October 2025. Co-founders Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline and Albert Punama, who previously built Typedream, pair AI visibility measurement with agent-ready pages for marketing and PR teams.
Last updated: November 3, 2026
What are the key facts about The Prompting Company?
The Prompting Company was founded in 2025 by three builders who have worked together for more than a decade. The company describes itself as an Agent Experience layer for software products, and it started life as a generative engine optimization (GEO) service that tested which questions customers ask AI and whether a product shows up in the answers. The table below lists its core facts, taken from the company's own funding announcement and the October 2025 coverage of the round.
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|
| Company | The Prompting Company (promptingcompany.com) |
| Category | AI visibility, GEO and agent experience platform |
| Founded | 2025 |
| Founders | Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline, Albert Punama |
| Prior company | Typedream, a Y Combinator W20 company later acquired by Beehiiv |
| Funding | $6.5 million seed |
| Lead investor | Peak XV Partners |
| Other investors | Y Combinator, Base10, Firedrop, Standard Capital, Kearny Jackson and angels including Logan Kilpatrick |
| Business model | Subscription, priced by prompts tracked and pages hosted |
| Security | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, according to the company's trust center |
| Partnership | Collaboration with Nvidia on next-generation AI search; details not disclosed |
The founders are Indonesian immigrants who met as college freshmen, according to reports of the round, and the team has a record of shipping products quickly. That track record is part of why investors moved fast on a company that was only about four months old when the seed was announced.
How much has The Prompting Company raised, and who invested?
The Prompting Company has disclosed a single funding round: a $6.5 million seed led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Base10. Coverage in October 2025 also named Firedrop and a group of angel investors that included Logan Kilpatrick. The company's own announcement, published on June 22, 2026, lists Standard Capital and Kearny Jackson among the participants as well. The full category funding map sits in EPR's Capital Behind AI Communications tracker.
| Round | Amount | Reported | Lead investor | Other investors |
|---|
| Seed | $6.5 million | October 2025 | Peak XV Partners | Y Combinator, Base10, Firedrop, Standard Capital, Kearny Jackson, angels |
Arnav Sahu, a partner at Peak XV, framed the bet in plain terms when the round was reported: a product that AI assistants never mention or cite faces a very hard road to growth. He described the company as core infrastructure for product discovery and said it was already serving high-growth startups and a Fortune 10 company.
According to the company, the seed money funds large-scale AI discovery testing, agent workflow evaluation, analytics, content generation, citation monitoring and optimization for AI-native traffic. Earlier reports said the capital would also deepen partnerships, including the Nvidia collaboration.
The Prompting Company's platform finds the exact questions customers ask AI assistants, tests whether a product appears in the answers across models, and then helps the brand fix what is missing. The company says the work happens in two stages, discovery and usability, and the product has widened over time from the first to the second.
- Finds the long, conversational prompts buyers actually type, such as a founder asking which business account has no monthly fees, instead of short keyword strings.
- Tests whether a product appears across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and which competitors the answers compare it against.
- Measures how AI systems describe the product and which sources they cite.
- Builds clean, agent-friendly pages without the navigation bars, pop-ups and marketing clutter that make human-first pages hard for machines to parse.
- Runs agent workflow tests that check whether a coding agent can find the right docs, use an MCP server, CLI, API or SDK, and finish a real task.
- Tracks citations and analytics so teams can see which placements shifted the answer.
A 2024 paper at the ACM KDD conference, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," by Pranjal Aggarwal of IIT Delhi, Vishvak Murahari of Princeton University and co-authors, found that rewriting content with citations, statistics and quotations could raise visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40 percent, and that the gains varied by subject area. The paper is the academic basis for the discipline EPR explains in its GEO guide.
The 2026 shift is the notable part. The Prompting Company says that after working with software, infrastructure and developer tool companies, it saw that being mentioned is only half the journey. Agents often failed to use a product even when they knew about it, picking the wrong docs, missing the right API or getting stuck on unclear errors. The company now frames its goal as getting products discovered, chosen and used by AI agents, which it calls Agent Experience.
Who uses The Prompting Company?
The Prompting Company says its customers are mostly software, infrastructure and developer tool businesses, plus a Fortune 10 company that it has not named. Reports of the seed round listed Rippling, Rho, Motion, Vapi, Fondo, Kernel and Traceloop among its clients. Those same reports said the company had already created about 500,000 AI-optimized pages that drive tens of millions of visits each month for clients. Those figures come from the company and have not been independently audited.
The company is most excited about teams that ship MCP servers, CLIs, APIs, SDKs or technical documentation that agents need to use. That focus makes it a natural fit for product marketing and developer relations teams, and a useful reference point for communications teams that support them. The company also offers a free trial, free tools and a public customer stories page, which makes its method easy for a team to test before committing budget.
How does The Prompting Company compare with its peers?
As of November 3, 2026, The Prompting Company is the youngest and smallest by total funding among the six AI visibility companies in the table below, which is typical for a seed-stage startup. Totals are the sum of publicly reported rounds, and each company links to its EPR profile where one exists.
| Company | Latest round | Total funding | Main buyer |
|---|
| Profound profile | $180 million Series D, September 15, 2026, led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins | $334.5 million | Enterprise brands |
| Bluefish profile | $43 million Series B, April 14, 2026, co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA | $68 million | Fortune 500 brands |
| Brandlight profile | $30 million Series A, February 11, 2026, led by Pelion Venture Partners | About $36 million | Enterprise brands and agencies |
| Peec AI profile | $21 million Series A, November 2025, led by Singular | About $29 million | Mid-market brands and agencies |
| Evertune profile | $15 million Series A, August 12, 2025, led by Felicis Ventures | About $19 million | Enterprise brands |
| The Prompting Company (this page) | $6.5 million seed, October 2025, led by Peak XV Partners | $6.5 million | Software, infrastructure and developer tool companies |
The clearest difference is the job each company does. Profound, Brandlight and Bluefish sell measurement and strategy to large brand teams. The Prompting Company pairs measurement with the publishing of agent-ready pages and with testing of whether agents can use a product, which speaks directly to software companies whose next customer may be an AI agent.
What should PR and communications teams do with this news?
PR and communications teams should treat this raise as a sign that AI visibility is moving from reporting to production, and that the pages, docs and third-party articles AI reads are now a shared marketing and communications asset. AI assistants build answers by retrieving and summarizing sources, so clear, consistent and well-cited material is more likely to appear in an answer.
- List the 25 questions a buyer would ask an AI assistant before choosing your product, and write them as full sentences, not keywords.
- Run those prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and record which brands are named, in what order, and with which sources.
- Compare the cited sources with your earned media list, and plan outreach for the publications that AI keeps citing in your category.
- If you sell software, ask product and developer relations teams to test whether an AI agent can find your docs and complete a basic task.
- Fix inaccurate or outdated pages first, then re-run the same prompts after each change and record the date. EPR's AI visibility audit method shows how.
EPR's AI visibility section links the other funding profiles and measurement guides in this category.
Sources used on this page
