AirOps raises $40 million Series B at $225 million valuation to rethink marketing in the age of AI
For marketers, SEOs, and humble journalists, the sky is falling. All the conventional wisdom about how to get traffic from Google is crumbling, with the new black box of chatbots emerging in its place. And while there are plenty of tools that can tell you how poorly you’re doing on ChatGPT or Anthropic searches, there are few options that provide concrete feedback on how to improve — and hopefully keep you writing content for another day.
New York and San Francisco-based startup AirOps is hoping to change that, and has a brand new valuation of $225 million, with $40 million in funding led by Greylock, to bring marketers to the new promised land of AI.
“The shift in discovery and insight from traditional search to LLMs is an extremely difficult problem for marketing executives,” Mike Dubow, a partner at Greylock, said in an email. “The entire marketing industry has to learn how to influence organic growth.”
Alex Halliday, CEO of AirOps, founded the company in early 2022 after leading product at other fast-growing startups like Teespring and MasterClass. This was about a year before ChatGPT’s public launch, and AirOps was not initially focused on AI, instead helping non-technical employees at companies access data. As large language models became more readily available and began integrating AI into the product, AirOps realized that marketers were becoming their primary users, using the data to either create or update content for their companies.
The core AirOps product allows marketers to analyze and track all the public information associated with their companies — whether in blog posts, customer testimonials, or even Reddit posts and news articles — and figure out how to keep it up to date. It’s used by the likes of Monday.com, Webflow, and Ramp. The workflow itself is like the kind of esoteric tools for SaaS offerings that would probably require an advanced degree, and I won’t try to describe it in great detail, but the real takeaway is the changing role of marketers.
According to Halliday, the key to driving growth in the age of search engine optimization (SEO) has been recycling, or repackaging content that already exists on the web. Now, he says, AI agents are starving for new data or opinions that haven’t already been published. This means that marketers can’t rely on the same tired lists or tired detailed articles from days gone by, but instead need to generate original ideas – a far more energy-intensive task, which, optimistically, makes their roles not only more valuable, but more interesting.
We seem to be walking on a tightrope. On both sides there is danger – the decline of AI, the death of media as we know it, with LLMs swallowing any last Web 2.0 dollars. But Halliday insists we’re entering a “golden age of high-quality content,” where AI agents reward brands (and publications like luck) which provides better quality information. Instead of helping marketers press one button and get enough bad content to last a lifetime, his company aims to help them “add to the conversation” by creating unique content in a data-rich way.
I was happy to hear that in this new future, it is very important for companies to put their ideas into outlets like luck (Maybe this is why my number of presentations increases every week). Although the business model for marketers is uncertain – will chatbots reliably direct readers to their websites and products? But it’s more ambiguous for news outlets, which in theory have never had as much domain authority.
If anyone has an idea on how to create AirOps for media, I’m all ears. On this note, I will be going on paternity leave until the end of the year. I hope you have everything figured out by the time I get back.
Leo Schwartz
tenth: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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Project deals
– Quick break Amnesty Internationalan AI-powered mathematical operations software company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, has raised $40 million in Series A funding from Greycroft, GTMfundet al.
– Onchilys Pharmaa cytotoxic therapeutics developer based in San Diego, California, has raised $25 million in Series A1 funding from Envivium capital, Kennedy Lewis Investments administrationet al.
– Terranovaa San Francisco-based developer of reclamation robotics, has raised $7 million in seed funding. Outlander and identical Projects He led the tour and joined him Help yourself Projects, Gothamsand Ponderosa.
– Avalona New York City-based developer of agentive AI technology designed to automate insurance claims tasks, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding. Front line Projects He led the tour and joined him Y Unified, 1984et al.
Private equity
– hexawaresupported private justiceacquired CyberSolvean identity and access management solutions company based in Sterling, Virginia. Financial terms were not disclosed.
2025-11-10 11:30:00
