Cognizo 🧠

AI search visibility for brands.

November 19, 2025

Spotlight

What if your brand could track and optimize its visibility in AI search the same way it does with Google SEO?

Quick Pitch: Cognizo is an AI Search Optimization platform that shows brands how they appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs, then generates recommendations to improve visibility.

The Problem

  • The Search Shift: 58% of consumers now use AI assistants to discover products—bypassing Google.

  • The Blind Spot: Brands have no insight into when or how they’re mentioned in AI answers.

  • The Impact: Organic traffic is projected to drop 50%, leaving billions in untracked marketing value.

Snapshot

  • Industry: AI Search Optimization / Marketing Analytics

  • Headquarters: New York City, NY

  • Year Founded: 2025

  • Traction: Hundreds of thousands in ARR within months, double-digit monthly growth, and enterprise customers including LG, Adobe, Pacsun, Corsair, and PAR.

Founder Profiles

  • Deniz Ozcan, Co-Founder, CEO: Former SEO lead at Poltio, investor at Rose Street Capital, and founder of Greenlight Partners syndicate.

  • Alp Aysan, Co-Founder, CTO: Former Microsoft Copilot engineer who built OneDrive’s first agentic search tool and scaled it to 600M users. Over a decade of AI/ML experience in NLP and information retrieval.

Funding

  • Current Round: Raising $1M (Seed)

  • Total Raised: $170K (Pre-Seed)

Revenue Engine

  • SaaS Subscription Model: Priced by coverage (number of buyer prompts tracked daily)

  • Land-and-Expand Strategy: Customers scale by adding brands and broadening prompt coverage

What Users Love

  • Visibility into AI mentions across major LLMs

  • Citation tracking to identify exact content sources (Reddit, competitor sites, etc.)

  • Automated recommendations on what content to create or refine

  • Metrics for share of voice, sentiment, and topical authority vs. competitors

Playing Field

  • Profound, Scrunch, AthenaHQ: Track AI visibility but stop at benchmarking

  • Traditional SEO Tools: Don't address AI search optimization

Cognizo's Edge: Tracks not just where brands appear, but why, and tells them exactly what to do about it.

Why It Matters

With ChatGPT surpassing one billion users in early 2025, AI assistants are becoming the new discovery engine. Brands need measurement and optimization tools for this channel or risk disappearing from the next era of search.

What Sets Them Apart

  • Full-Stack Platform: Generates prompts, extracts mentions, surfaces citations, and delivers optimization recommendations in one system

  • Proprietary Recommendation Engine: Turns citation data into strategies across content, social, affiliates, and PR.

  • Enterprise Traction: 50 plus paying customers including LG, Adobe, Corsair, Wellhub, and Pacsun.

  • Expansion Potential: LG alone has 60 brands that could quadruple current ARR

Analysis

Bulls Case 📈 

  • Rapid month over month growth

  • First mover in AI search optimization

  • Founders combine SEO, venture, and AI infrastructure expertise

  • Enterprise logos validate product-market fit

Bears Case 📉 

  • New category requires market education

  • Execution risk in scaling enterprise sales

  • Competitors could accelerate with more capital

  • Reliant on continued LLM adoption and citation transparency

Verdict

Cognizo fills a critical gap as search shifts from Google to AI assistants. The team’s deep SEO and AI infrastructure expertise, early enterprise traction, and clear expansion path position them well to define this emerging category.

The open question is whether AI search optimization becomes a standalone discipline or folds into existing SEO tools. Given ChatGPT’s billion user milestone, timing favors Cognizo’s early lead.

For investors, it is a chance to back a first mover in a space that could mirror SEO’s rise if Cognizo executes fast enough before incumbents catch up.

The Startup Pulse

Another happening week in startup funding. Strong activity across AI, defense tech, fintech, healthtech, and AI infrastructure.

  • Anysphere (Cursor) — Raised $2.3B at a $29.3B valuation to expand its AI coding and enterprise platform, backed by NVIDIA, Google, Accel, a16z Speedrun, Thrive, and Coatue.

  • Parallel — Secured $100M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Index to give AI agents real-time web access for enterprise workflows, with Khosla joining.

  • AirOps — Closed $40M Series B to help brands maintain visibility and trust as AI transforms search, serving customers like Ramp, Chime, and Wiz.

Written by Ashher

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