Former Google executive Justin Inman is betting that the next major battleground for brands won’t be search rankings or social feeds—but AI-generated answers.
His startup, Emberos, announced Monday it raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding from a single angel investor. Inman, who is Emberos’ founder and chief executive officer, declined to disclose specifics.
Founded last year, the company is positioning itself for a moment when discovery increasingly happens inside AI-generated responses rather than through blue-link search results.
Emberos works across five major AI platforms—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok—and plans to expand into voice assistants like Alexa. Its pricing is based on the number of agents a client deploys, spanning monitoring, predictive strategy, workflow orchestration, agentic shopping and AI governance, Inman said.
The pitch comes as brands grapple with how large language models interpret and sometimes misrepresent them, often without visibility into where those narratives originate or how they calcify over time.
“At our core, we help brands of understand and control how they’re represented in AI answers—not just from a visibility standpoint, but also recommendations across all the major models,” Inman said. “We are the infrastructure layer for what we call AI brand orchestration.”
The market for AI answer engine optimization is becoming increasingly crowded as marketers adjust to a shift in how people discover information, a pull away from traditional search and toward summarized chatbot responses. Startups including Profound and BlueFish have drawn investor interest by helping brands understand how they surface inside AI-generated answers.
Emberos has 14 employees and is using its pre-seed funding to invest in engineering while building partnerships and service capabilities, Inman told ADWEEK, adding that the company plans to raise a seed round by the end of the first quarter.
The company is working with entertainment studios, ad agencies, consumer brands—including celebrity-owned brands—and political organizations. Inman declined to name clients.
