A serial founder's third act
Chris Donnelly is not a first-time founder learning on the job. He previously built and sold the digital agency Verb for a reported $30 million, scaled the insurtech Lottie to a nine-figure valuation, and then built the Creator Accelerator to $10 million in turnover in its first year. Each venture compounded the last: a bigger network, sharper instincts, and a personal brand that opens doors.
That track record matters because Searchable's early traction looks impossible without it. Founded in 2025 in London, the company sells a simple but urgent proposition: as AI-generated answers replace link-based search results, brands need to know where they appear — or don't — inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and what to do about it. Donnelly calls the category AEO, answer-engine optimization, and he moved before the acronym was fashionable.
The insight came from watching his own behavior. Donnelly was already running his businesses on Claude daily — projects, connectors, skills, agents — and realized that if founders like him were getting answers from AI instead of Google, every brand's discovery funnel was about to break. Searchable is the tool he wished existed for that world.
Co-founder Sam Hogan completes the picture on the operating side, but the public face of the company is unmistakably Donnelly — and that is deliberate. In a category where trust is the product, the founder is the brand.
Six figures of ARR in 24 hours
Searchable's launch numbers read like a typo. The invite-only soft launch reportedly generated six figures in annual recurring revenue within its first 24 hours, with multiple global brands migrating from established US competitors. Within about five months, Donnelly was publicly stating the company had hit $3M in ARR with nearly a thousand customers onboarded.
The mechanics behind the sprint are less mysterious than they look. First, the product launched to buyers, not beta testers: global brands with real budgets and a real pain — invisibility inside AI answers. Second, the category timing did heavy lifting. In 2025, CMOs were confronting what one investor called the biggest change in online visibility since the early days of Google, and Searchable was one of the few credible tools purpose-built for it.
Third, Donnelly's distribution was pre-built. Years of building in public — detailed LinkedIn playbooks on funnels, AI stacks, and growth systems — meant that every launch post reached founders and marketers who already trusted him. The audience was the go-to-market.
Donnelly's LinkedIn post breaking down the full Claude stack — projects, connectors, skills, Cowork, Claude in Chrome, artifacts — doubled as both thought leadership and product marketing. When the person selling you AI visibility visibly runs their company on AI, the credibility gap closes to zero.
From seed to $85M valuation
The fundraising arc tells the same story in investor language. Searchable first raised a €3.4 million seed round led by Freestyle VC, with partner Maria Palma praising not just the analytics but the recommendation engine — the part that tells brands what to actually do. Then came a $14 million round led by Headline, the global firm behind Bumble, Farfetch, and Semrush, at an $85 million valuation.
Headline partner Dominic Wilhelm framed the bet clearly: AI-driven discovery is rewriting how customers find products, and brands invisible in that layer will quietly lose demand. The firm sees Searchable becoming core infrastructure for the shift — not just reporting what AI engines say, but directly improving the visibility and revenue outcomes that matter to boards.
For founders watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is that capital followed traction, not the other way around. Searchable raised its seed after the soft launch had already proven demand, and the Series A-scale round after revenue was compounding. The pitch was never a vision deck; it was a dashboard.
What comes after the land grab
The product itself is evolving from analytics toward agency. Searchable monitors brand visibility across conversational engines, integrates with Google Analytics and Search Console, and lets marketers ask plain-English questions like which AI models recommend us. The newer execution engine goes further, rewriting content and boosting metadata readability for LLMs — essentially an agentic AI marketing team that works around the clock.
The free AI visibility report is the cleverest growth loop: the same diagnostic used in paid onboarding is given away to anyone who comments on Donnelly's LinkedIn posts. Prospects see exactly where competitors are getting cited instead of them, which makes the paid product feel less like a purchase and more like the obvious fix.
Analysts estimate the AI search optimization category could exceed $30–50 billion by 2030. Whether Searchable captures a slice of that depends on execution against well-funded competitors like Peec AI, but the company has already done the hardest part: it turned a founder's hunch into millions in revenue before most of the market had even named the category.
The competitive moat question is real: Peec AI raised €18M, and US incumbents are waking up. But Searchable's bet is that execution speed plus founder-led distribution beats balance-sheet size in a category being defined in real time. So far, the revenue curve agrees.
The playbook
- Compound wins across companies — Donnelly sold Verb for $30M and scaled Lottie before starting Searchable — every launch began with an existing network of buyers and operators.
- Launch to buyers with budget, not beta testers — Their invite-only soft launch generated six figures of ARR in 24 hours by starting with global brands already frustrated with US incumbents.
- Give away the diagnosis, sell the cure — A free AI visibility report — the same diagnostic used in paid onboarding — turns LinkedIn comments into a qualified pipeline.
- Build in public at founder scale — Donnelly publishes his full Claude/AI stack and growth playbooks in public, which positions Searchable as the practitioner-led authority in AEO.
- Sell outcomes, not analytics — Monitoring brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity plus a recommendation engine — not just dashboards — justifies premium pricing.