Petra Labs has raised $5.2 million in seed funding to expand its answer engine optimization platform for enterprise brands. Work-Bench led the round, with participation from Afore, Pathlight and strategic angel investors.
Petra helps companies measure and improve the frequency with which their brands appear in answers generated by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. The company combines proprietary software with an embedded team that manages strategy and execution for customers.
Answer engine optimization, commonly abbreviated as AEO, focuses on improving whether and how a company, product or service is mentioned when consumers ask AI systems for information, comparisons and buying recommendations.
Many existing tools primarily measure visibility by showing whether a brand appears in AI-generated answers. Petra is developing custom attribution models that link those appearances to AI-referred website traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue.
The company believes this measurement is necessary for enterprise brands to determine whether their AI search investments are generating financial returns. Custom attribution can also help marketers decide how to allocate spending across prompts, content initiatives and outside publications.
Petra addresses a second challenge by helping customers act on the data generated by AI visibility platforms. Brands may need to evaluate millions of citations, identify the most important prompts and determine which sources influence AI-generated responses.
The company’s specialists work alongside customers to establish an AI search strategy and execute the related content and visibility initiatives. Petra is primarily targeting large brands with complex marketing operations and significant AEO investments.
Petra was founded in 2025 by CEO Sami Akkawi, CTO Rishi Penmetcha and COO Ramie Khoury.
Akkawi previously spent five years at Strategy&, where he advised private equity firms across more than 50 acquisitions involving marketing data, technology and services.
Penmetcha has experience developing large-scale data systems and most recently worked on AI agents at Traba. Khoury built and led Traba’s growth team, with a focus on enterprise sales and operations.
Petra plans to use the seed funding to expand its measurement platform, embedded services, and ability to connect AI search activity with measurable business results.
KEY QUOTES:
“We built Petra Labs to serve as an extension of our customers’ teams and own AI Search business outcomes end-to-end.”
“From day 1, it was clear to us that the only way to deliver on that promise was to truly understand how these AI search investments translate to revenue.”
Sami Akkawi, Co-Founder and CEO of Petra Labs
“Every marketing channel eventually has to prove its return, and AI search will be no different.”
“For enterprise brands deploying millions of dollars across channels, effective and detailed attribution is crucial. Petra is the first AI search team we have seen that ties AI visibility software insights directly to revenue and owns the end-to-end process for their customers.”
“That combination of measurement rigor and outcomes-based work is why we led this round.”
Jessica Lin, Co-Founder and General Partner at Work-Bench
