Searchable raises $14 million as AI search attracts venture capital

Searchable’s latest funding round lands with the kind of speed that agency owners notice. The AI performance marketing platform raised $14 million led by Headline at an $85 million valuation, and says it has already reached $2 million in revenue in 4.5 months while onboarding nearly 1,000 customers. That is the sort of traction that turns AI search from a talking point into a line item in client budgets, especially for agencies still selling only classic rankings work.

The bigger signal is how Searchable is framing demand. The company says AI-enabled search could reach roughly 70% penetration by 2027, that 65% of searches already end without a click, and that AI-generated overviews now appear in nearly half of Google searches. Chris Donnelly, Searchable’s founder, says the company’s data shows customers convert at 3x higher rates when they arrive from ChatGPT and other large language models. For SEO agencies, that shifts the conversation from where a page ranks to whether a brand appears inside the answer itself, and whether that visibility is tied to revenue rather than impressions.

Headline’s involvement makes the round look less like a speculative seed check and more like a bet on search infrastructure. The firm says its portfolio includes Bumble, Farfetch, Goop and Sonos, and it has previously backed Semrush, the SEO software company Adobe agreed to acquire on November 19, 2025 for about $1.9 billion in an all-cash deal at $12.00 per share. Adobe said the acquisition would combine Semrush’s GEO and SEO capabilities with its own marketing stack, a sign that brand visibility tooling is moving up the enterprise software food chain as AI discovery becomes more central.

Searchable is also selling a founder story that fits the moment. The company says Donnelly previously scaled Verb Brands from £400 to an eight-figure exit, and its own author page says he built Verb Brands into one of the leading luxury agencies before selling it in 2021. Searchable says it plans to accelerate product development and expand in the U.S. and U.K., while building tools that automate repetitive SEO labor and connect paid and organic AI visibility in one attribution layer. That is the real budget signal here: agencies that once sold rankings will need to sell search and buying-journey visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google, because that is where clients are starting to spend.