Petra Labs raises $5.2M in seed funding
Today we're announcing Petra Labs' $5.2M seed round, led by Work-Bench alongside Afore Capital and Pathlight.
We believe the greatest AI companies of the future will sell results. As such, we started Petra Labs to own AI search outcomes for our customers, end to end, as the answer engine optimization (AEO) partner for enterprise brands. In delivering on this vision, two truths have guided us from day one.
AI search is a zero-sum game
When a buyer asks ChatGPT which vendor to choose, the model recommends a handful of names. Your brand is chosen or a competitor's is.
ChatGPT crossed a billion monthly users in May, and Bain finds AI overviews now make 70% of searches zero-click. In response, brands are investing millions to improve their AI search performance.
That spend hits a structural problem. SEO ran on a bounded set of inputs (backlinks, on-page content, keywords, site health) that behaved consistently everywhere, so shared playbooks worked. LLMs broke that pattern: answers emerge from relationships learned across the entire public internet, and the permutations across models and prompts dwarf anything SEO produced. There is no single AEO algorithm, and what moves the answer for an insurance brand may do nothing for a software company.
In a zero-sum game, a playbook everyone can buy wins for no one. You need an answer built for your business.
Results are only as good as your ability to measure them
Before founding Petra, we ran thousands of interviews with the marketing leaders who own AI search budgets, and the same complaint kept surfacing: nobody could credibly connect marketing dollars to real AI Search business outcomes.
Brands were forced to rely on synthetically generated visibility and citation metrics that didn’t map back to real costs or revenue.
What we built
We built Petra to be an extension of our customers' teams and to own their AI search outcomes end to end. Doing that well means both measuring what a brand's AI search efforts return and helping them act on what they find.
We offer custom last-mile attribution to measure that return. It goes beyond whether a brand appears in AI answers and connects that visibility to AI-referred traffic and revenue. Because every company defines success differently, we build the model around each customer's own data and the metrics their team is held to. That gives a marketing team a clear read on what their AI search work is returning, and the evidence to decide where to spend next.
Acting on that read is harder than a dashboard makes it look. Someone still has to choose the right prompts to track and make sense of the millions of rows of citation data beneath them. We offer a team of AEO experts who take this on as an extension of our customers’ teams, setting the strategy and carrying it out across the channels that shape AI answers. This is high-touch work, and it fits large brands whose AEO programs carry real complexity.
We're based in New York, in the same city as many of the teams we serve, and we work alongside them in person. If you've spent the past year piecing together tools and instinct to understand what AI search is doing to your funnel, we built Petra Labs for you. .