The Prompting Company Raises $6.5M Seed to Build AI Visibility Infrastructure
The Prompting Company raised a $6.5 million seed round from Peak XV Partners, Y Combinator, Base10 Partners, Firedrop, and angel investor Logan Kilpatrick to help businesses get discovered and used by AI models and autonomous agents. Founded in 2025 during Y Combinator's S25 batch, the San Francisco-based startup has grown to four employees and hosts roughly half a million AI-optimized pages that drive double-digit millions of monthly visits to customer websites, TechCrunch reported.
As buyers shift from traditional search engines to conversational interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, products risk becoming invisible if they do not appear in AI-generated answers. The Prompting Company builds infrastructure for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), serving structured content engineered for large language models to crawl, retrieve, and cite.
Building Interfaces for Autonomous Agents and AI Search
The company's technical stack relies on Next.js and TypeScript on the frontend, Go on the backend, and Postgres with pgvector for vector storage. Analytics are handled through Tinybird, while Cloudflare Workers and Kubernetes manage edge routing and latency targets. The platform runs large-scale prompt evaluations across models to calculate brand Share of Voice, while tracking token-level costs, caching, and deduplication for high-volume agent traffic.
Beyond generating AI-facing pages without marketing fluff or navigation bars, The Prompting Company tests whether autonomous developer agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex can execute tasks using a product's documentation and API. Speaking on The Microdose, co-founder Michelle Marcelline explained that the platform spins up virtual sandboxes to observe where agents encounter friction—such as mandatory email authentication or paywalls—and recommends adjustments like free trials to facilitate automated adoption.
To build out these crawling and evaluation systems, The Prompting Company is hiring a Fullstack Engineer ($100k–$150k) in San Francisco. The role focuses on designing production systems in Next.js, TypeScript, or Go to analyze how agents retrieve and cite web content for clients including NVIDIA and Rho.
Repeat YC Founders Behind the Platform
The Prompting Company was founded by CEO Kevin Chandra, COO Michelle Marcelline, and CTO Albert Purnama. The three co-founders met during their freshman year of computer science studies in the United States after emigrating from Indonesia, as Michelle Marcelline shared on the Daivik Goel podcast.
The team previously built Cotter, a passwordless authentication SDK that was acquired by Stytch, and Typedream (YC W20), a no-code website builder acquired by beehiiv. Their third company targets enterprise clients, developer tools, and e-commerce brands, counting customers such as Rippling, Motion, Vapi, Fondo, Kernel, and Traceloop, alongside an ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA on next-generation search.
To manage enterprise deployments and bridge technical delivery with client revenue, the company is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer ($100k–$150k) in San Francisco. The role requires working directly with clients to integrate the platform into existing workflows and guarantee measurable visibility across platforms like Claude and Gemini.
Expanding Go-to-Market and Internal Operations
Following its seed funding, The Prompting Company is scaling from founder-led sales to a structured go-to-market model. On the Beyond Trending podcast, Michelle Marcelline highlighted that while initial adoption centered on developer tools whose users work in AI environments continuously, broader expansion includes fintech, SaaS, and large e-commerce brands.
To drive revenue growth, the company is recruiting a Founding Account Executive ($80k–$120k) to define the ideal customer profile, manage sales pipelines, and establish a repeatable deal process. The company is also seeking a Founding GTM ($80k–$120k) director to oversee positioning, community initiatives, and inbound and outbound motions targeting major technical accounts like Databricks and NVIDIA.
To support engineering and commercial expansion, The Prompting Company is also adding a Founding Ops ($100k–$150k) director in San Francisco. This operational role will build internal administrative infrastructure across finance, legal, recruiting, and office management to remove operational friction for technical and revenue teams.
Open Roles at The Prompting Company
All open roles are full-time, onsite positions located in San Francisco, California:
| Role | Location | Work Mode | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fullstack Engineer | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $100,000 – $150,000 |
| Forward Deployed Engineer | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $100,000 – $150,000 |
| Founding Ops | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $100,000 – $150,000 |
| Founding GTM | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $80,000 – $120,000 |
| Founding Account Executive | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $80,000 – $120,000 |
