Toronto-based ChatFeatured closed an oversubscribed $2 million pre-seed round on July 22 to build an autonomous agent that optimizes brands’ visibility inside AI search results. Storytime Capital led the round, with participation from Garage Capital and BY Venture Partners, according to the company’s announcement.
The Product
ChatFeatured operates in a category its founders call answer engine optimization (AEO). The platform analyzes what large language models are citing when users ask purchase and comparison questions, identifies where competitors are winning those citations, builds a content strategy, writes and publishes the content, and measures the resulting lift.
Most AI search optimization tools stop at measurement: dashboards that show a brand’s current visibility without acting on it. ChatFeatured’s pitch is closing that loop. “Most marketing teams are being handed dashboards that tell them there is a problem and leave them to solve it,” co-founder and CEO Farris Nasr told MarTech Series. “We built ChatFeatured to do the work.”
Traction and Growth
The company launched in the first week of January 2026. Six months later, it serves customers across the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany, with month-over-month growth exceeding 40%, according to Pulse 2.0. ChatFeatured initially targeted a $1.5 million raise and expanded to $2 million after investor demand.
Founding Team
Nasr and co-founder Nithiiyan Skhanthan met at a Toronto Tech Week networking event. Nasr spent over a decade in go-to-market roles before teaching himself to code. Skhanthan began his career as an engineer at Tesla and was an early hire at two VC-backed startups, including YC-backed LifestyleRx, per the company announcement.
Ryan Nahas joined as founding head of growth after first using ChatFeatured as a customer. His prior experience includes head of SMB growth at Salesforce and two private equity exits.
Why It Matters for Agent Builders
ChatFeatured is building what amounts to an agent-for-agents play. As buyer-side AI assistants become a primary product discovery channel, the companies those assistants recommend gain a structural advantage. ChatFeatured’s autonomous agent will proactively identify gaps in a brand’s online presence, surface third-party publications worth pursuing, recommend editorial opportunities, and create supporting content, all without waiting for a marketer to review a dashboard.
“AI search is already where buying decisions are being made,” Lauren Epstein, general partner at Storytime Capital, said in the announcement. “What impressed us about ChatFeatured is that while most companies are still asking the question, this team built the answer.”
The $2 million raise is small, but the category is new. No major martech vendor (HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo) has shipped a product specifically targeting LLM citation optimization. The question is whether AEO remains a standalone category or gets absorbed into existing SEO platforms as AI search traffic scales.