Rankfor.ai Secures Funding to Shape the Future of AI-Driven Brand Visibility
Marketing, Artificial Intelligence
💎 AI becomes the new discovery layer — and Rankfor.ai wants to ensure companies are not invisible in it.
Rankfor.ai, a Polish startup pioneering the emerging field of AI Engine Optimization (AIEO), has secured a new investment from Simpact Ventures, the region’s first impact-driven VC fund. The funding will support global expansion, growth of the partner network, and continued development of the platform designed to show brands how artificial intelligence perceives them — and how to influence those perceptions.
At the heart of Rankfor.ai is a simple but increasingly vital question: What does AI think about your brand? As user behaviour shifts from traditional search engines to conversational interfaces such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, the rules of visibility are being rewritten. Instead of fighting for ranking positions, companies must now compete to become the default answers generated by AI models. This shift especially threatens small and mid-sized businesses, which risk disappearing from AI recommendations dominated by global tech giants.
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Simpact Ventures sees this as one of the most significant strategic challenges emerging in digital marketing. “We’re not investing in another SEO tool, but in the creators of the visibility standards of the future,” says Krzysztof Grochowski, Partner at Simpact Ventures. “As AI becomes the starting point for discovering brands, companies need the ability to understand how they are perceived — and how to shape that perception. Rankfor.ai gives them this visibility layer.”
The startup achieves this by analysing how different AI systems describe a brand, its products, and its attributes. Rankfor.ai maps where companies appear across AI-generated responses, quantifies their presence, and helps structure product data so that algorithms interpret it correctly. One pillar of the product focuses on identifying “blind spots,” moments where brands should appear but do not — a critical weakness in a world shifting toward AI-mediated user journeys.
Co-founder and CEO Dmitrij Zatuchin describes the platform as a response to a fundamental market transformation. “AI has become a new layer of brand discovery,” he explains. “We help companies see what AI already ‘knows’ about them, and what actions they can take to appear more often — and more accurately — in recommendations.”
Rankfor.ai positions itself at the intersection of content structuring, AI ranking analysis, and actionable optimization recommendations. It builds a framework of machine-readable inputs designed specifically for LLMs and multimodal models, enabling brands to communicate with both humans and algorithms. “We create content that machines understand and people trust,” adds co-founder Marzena Ferguson.
For Simpact Ventures, the investment aligns with its broader mission to support technologies generating positive societal and economic impact. AIEO, as a category, addresses the widening visibility gap between large corporations equipped with advanced AI resources and smaller businesses lacking the capacity to adapt to new digital environments. By making AI visibility measurable and actionable, Rankfor.ai democratizes access to the emerging discovery infrastructure.
More broadly, the investment signals an industry shift: as artificial intelligence becomes the primary interface for search, recommendation, and decision-making, mastery of AI-driven visibility may soon be as essential as early SEO strategies were in the 2000s. Rankfor.ai enters this space early, aiming to define the standards and methodologies of a sector that will rapidly expand as adoption of generative AI accelerates.
Simpact Ventures, which invests across Central and Eastern Europe, emphasizes that Rankfor.ai is not merely adding features to existing marketing stacks but building an entirely new layer that will sit beneath future customer journeys. As companies navigate the transition from search-centric discovery to AI-centric interaction, the startup aims to ensure that European brands — not just American tech giants — retain visibility in global markets.
Tags: AI, marketing
