Scrunch AI raises $15M in funding to optimize brand visibility and discovery for AI agents and LLMs

AI startup Scrunch AI just pulled in a $15 million Series A round to help brands show up where it matters most: AI search. The round was led by Decibel, with backing from Mayfield, Homebrew, and a group of strategic investors betting that traditional SEO is no longer enough.

In just three months, Scrunch has grown its paying customer base by over 50% month-over-month. More than 500 brands now rely on its platform to monitor how they appear in generative search tools—and improve it. Most of that growth has come without outbound marketing. It’s been inbound, and for good reason: customers report seeing a 40% boost in referral traffic and as much as 4x improvement in their visibility across platforms powered by large language models.

Scrunch isn’t just targeting big brands. The company recently rolled out a program for agencies as well, giving them the tools to support multiple clients as AI search becomes the new standard. The agency program includes features for managing content visibility at scale, with the kind of insights needed to navigate what’s coming next.

“Your website doesn’t need to go away, but 90% of its human traffic will,” said Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Scrunch AI. “AI agents are becoming the new front door to your brand, and we’re building the infrastructure that helps you show up, stand out, and stay ahead.”

With $15M Funding, AI Startup Scrunch AI Aims to Help Brands Stand Out in AI Search and LLM-Driven Discovery

Co-founded by seasoned SaaS product leader Chris Andrew, Scrunch AI spent the last two years working closely with enterprise clients to understand how AI is reshaping the customer journey. After operating in stealth, the company launched publicly in November 2024 and now works with more than 25 brands—including Lenovo, BairesDev, Crunchbase, Fictiv, top financial institutions, and others—who rely on Scrunch to improve how they show up across AI-driven discovery platforms.

“We’ve raised a $15 million Series A to build the infrastructure for AI-native marketing, Scrunch AI said in a post.

To date, Scrunch has raised $19 million from investors including Decibel, Mayfield, and Homebrew, with additional backing from well-known operators like TJ Parker (PillPack), Bryant Chou (Webflow), and Clara Shih (Meta AI, formerly Salesforce and Hearsay). The platform gives brands a clear picture of how they’re performing in AI search, highlights content gaps, and helps them restructure their websites so that AI agents can actually interpret and rank their content correctly.

With this new round, Scrunch isn’t just keeping up with the shift to AI-driven discovery—it’s trying to define it.

That’s the bet driving Scrunch’s new direction. The way people discover brands is shifting fast. Scrunch AI started out to answer a basic question: how does a brand look in AI search results? That insight turned into something bigger—a blueprint for how discovery works now that people are using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others to find what they need.

To get there, the company has analyzed tens of millions of prompts and citations across major platforms, learning how large language models decide what to include, what to ignore, and how to rank content. Scrunch is now putting those findings to use by rolling out a new product called the Agent Experience Platform, or AXP.

AXP is built for AI crawlers, not humans. It allows companies to serve machine-readable content that’s optimized for generative systems, without changing their actual websites. Human users still get the regular site experience, but AI engines get something leaner, structured, and easier to parse. AXP is already being tested with enterprise customers and is expected to roll out more widely soon.

“Scrunch has the unique advantage of having built the foundation first—collecting data, learning from real-world behavior, and shipping with speed,” said Jon Sakoda, Partner at Decibel. “They’re not just observing the AI shift. They’re helping brands rewrite the web for AI Agents.”

Right now, most companies are lagging behind. Over 70% of Fortune 1000 websites are hard for AI crawlers to make sense of. And yet, many are still pouring money into traditional search strategies that no longer align with how people are actually finding products and services.

Scrunch is betting that the companies who figure this out early will have an edge. With a market opportunity north of $100 billion, the team sees itself not just as a visibility platform but as an infrastructure layer for the future of brand discovery.

“We believe the best marketers will be the ones who adapt first,” said Andrew. “Scrunch gives them the platform and technology to do exactly that.”