Searchable has announced a £10.3 million ($14 million) funding round. The fresh capital values the red-hot company at £62.9 million ($85 million), coming just ten months after its initial incorporation.
This investment round was led by global venture capital firm Headline, an early backer of SEO giant Semrush, with participation from previous investors. The financial injection follows an early-stage $4 million round led by Freestyle, bringing Searchable’s total funding to date to roughly $18 million.
The startup plans to use the capital to scale its engineering efforts and aggressively expand its commercial presence across both the UK and US markets.
Shifting the Landscape: From Links to LLMs
Founded by serial British tech entrepreneur Chris Donnelly, Searchable aims to solve a looming existential crisis for modern brands: the death of the traditional blue web link.
For nearly three decades, corporate marketing budgets have been tied directly to optimising web pages for Google’s link-based index. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s own AI-generated search overviews has changed customer behaviour entirely.
Source: Unsplash
Recent data suggests that AI-powered search overviews now appear in nearly half of all standard Google queries, and an estimated 65% of internet searches now end natively without a user ever clicking through to an external website.
Searchable acts as an AI performance marketing platform and growth command centre, allowing enterprises to track, audit, and systematically improve their visibility across 10 major AI-led search engines.
“Search is going through a once-in-a-generation reset,” said Chris Donnelly, founder of Searchable. “When an AI assistant recommends your brand, customers arrive with significantly more intent, more trust, and a shorter path to purchase.
According to our internal data, customers convert at three times the rate when they arrive from LLMs compared to traditional search. If your brand is invisible in those answers, you are quietly bleeding market share to your competitors.”
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Hyper-Growth in Under Five Months
The funding round highlights Searchable’s astronomical growth trajectory. Since launching its commercial platform, the company has achieved £1.4 million ($2 million) in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in less than five months, recently scaling past an annual run rate of £2 million.
The platform has rapidly onboarded nearly 1,000 customers, including top-tier enterprise accounts such as American Express, KPMG, Siemens, Pfizer, Tencent, and the Boston Consulting Group. According to the company, enterprise-scale clients report an average 22% increase in AI-driven traffic within their first 60 days of deploying the software.
Beyond simply reporting what chatbots say about a specific company, Searchable provides an actionable execution layer. It automates content optimisations, handles technical fixes, and seamlessly hooks into legacy infrastructure like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to cut corporate SEO operational costs by up to 40%.
The Investor Perspective
Headline’s lead investment reflects deep venture conviction that the digital marketing playbook is being completely rewritten. Dominic R. Wilhelm, Partner at Headline, drew direct parallels to the firm’s historic bet on the traditional SEO market.
“We backed Semrush early as the category leader and exited following its IPO at around a $2 billion market cap,” Wilhelm said in a statement. “Now, we see an entirely new generation of businesses emerging. AI-driven discovery is rewriting how customers find products, and the economics are moving fast. We see Searchable becoming part of the core infrastructure for this shift – not just reporting on data, but directly improving the visibility and revenue outcomes that matter to management teams and boards.”
With the generative AI search market projected to reach a 70% market penetration by 2027, Searchable is well-positioned to cement its role as the dominant infrastructure layer for the next era of internet advertising.
