Yolando Launches GEO Platform With $8.5 Million Backing From Drive Capital

As buyer discovery increasingly shifts from traditional search engines to AI generated answers, a new category of marketing technology is emerging to help brands stay visible where decisions are now being made. Yolando has officially launched its commercial platform, announcing $8.5 million in total cumulative funding led by Drive Capital to support its expansion in the fast growing Generative Engine Optimization market.

Yolando is designed to help companies understand how they appear in AI generated responses across tools such as ChatGPT, while also providing clear actions to improve visibility across both AI platforms and traditional search. The platform combines competitive intelligence, strategic recommendations, and on brand content generation to give marketing teams insight into where they are winning or losing attention and how to respond at scale.

The launch comes as buyer behavior undergoes a fundamental shift. Before visiting a website, booking a demo, or engaging with sales, prospects increasingly turn to AI assistants for recommendations. These early answers often determine which brands make the shortlist and which are excluded entirely. This dynamic affects a wide range of industries, from B2B SaaS and professional services to healthcare and financial services, where trust and visibility directly influence revenue outcomes.

Yolando was built by marketers who experienced this change firsthand. Founder and CEO Matt Bogoroch also leads BirdseyePost, a high growth marketing software business navigating the same AI driven discovery challenges. As AI tools began influencing which companies buyers trusted, Bogoroch and his team found that existing tools could measure visibility but offered little guidance on how to act.

When they could not find a solution that connected competitive insight with execution, they built Yolando internally. In production use, the platform reduced demand generation friction, improved visibility in AI generated answers, and increased conversion performance. According to the company, inbound leads from ChatGPT were worth 20 percent more in revenue and closed 40 percent faster compared to referrals or leads from Google or outbound sales motions.

What began as an internal system has now been productized for other teams facing similar pressures. “Before a prospect ever visits your website, they’ve already asked ChatGPT who to trust,” said Bogoroch. “If you’re not in that answer, you’re not in the conversation. Yolando makes sure you are.”

Unlike many emerging tools in the GEO space, Yolando aims to close the gap between insight and action. Rather than simply reporting rankings or sentiment, the platform identifies competitor activity, highlights content gaps, flags changes in brand perception, and generates publish ready content briefs that teams can execute on immediately.

The technology behind Yolando is powered by a proprietary model trained on millions of web pages to understand the patterns that influence AI citation and recommendation behavior. “Traditional AI-generated content often just parrots existing sources, which means it gets ignored by the very models it’s trying to influence,” said Shardul Frey, Co-Founder and CTO of Yolando. “We trained our system to identify patterns that actually drive LLM citation behavior, so every piece of content Yolando generates introduces something genuinely new to the conversation.”

As Generative Engine Optimization becomes a critical layer of modern search and discovery, Yolando commercial launch, backed by Drive Capital, reflects how marketers are moving beyond measurement toward platforms that help them actively shape how their brands appear in AI driven decision making.