Ranketta, built by a 21-year-old Czech AI researcher, lands €1 million to measure brand presence in LLMs

Brno-based Ranketta, an AI visibility platform helping brands understand and improve their presence in AI search and AI Shopping results, has raised €1 million in pre-Seed funding.

The round was led by Lighthouse Ventures with participation from Gi21 Capital.

“Coming from the research world, I saw firsthand the lack of visibility that companies have into how AI systems influence what people buy. Traditional SEO and analytics no longer show the full picture of how customers discover products, and brands need tools that work across both old and new search channels,” says Vojtěch Oravec, CEO and founder of Ranketta.

In 2025, several European startups operating in AI search, ecommerce optimisation, and brand-visibility tooling have secured new investment, illustrating growing momentum in this emerging segment.

In Prague, TopK raised €4.6 million to build an AI-native enterprise search engine, while Berlin-based Peec AI secured €7 million to support its generative-search optimisation platform for marketing teams. In the UK, Merx closed €1.1 million at pre-Seed for its AI-enabled conversational commerce layer, and Ghent-based Dalton raised €1 million to turn websites into AI-powered growth engines.

Combined, these companies attracted approximately €13.7 million in 2025, signalling investor interest in tools that help brands surface, perform, or convert within AI-driven discovery environments.

Ranketta’s pre-Seed round fits into this pattern, with another Czech startup (TopK) also raising capital this year – highlighting Czechia’s growing presence in AI search-related innovation.

While other companies in adjacent verticals raised larger Seed rounds, Ranketta enters the landscape with early traction and a specialised focus on measuring and improving brand and product visibility inside generative-AI results, a capability that aligns closely with the wider market activity.

“Ranketta turns AI Shopping into a real acquisition channel that companies can monitor, improve, and grow. Our mission is to ensure every brand can compete fairly in the AI-driven discovery landscape,” adds Oravec.

Founded in 2025 by AI researcher and product builder Vojtěch Oravec, Ranketta is a platform that measures and improves brand visibility in AI-generated answers. It helps D2C, ecommerce, and B2B brands track their presence across large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, offering real data and actionable suggestions to improve rankings.

Before launching Ranketta, 21 year old Oravec conducted research in the group of Tomáš Mikolov at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) at Czech Technical University.

In just two months since launch, Ranketta has reportedly reached €86k ($100k) ARR and now supports more than 20 rapidly growing European brands, including Brainmarket, Boost.space, Purple Technology and Sloneek.

Michal Zálešák, Managing Partner at LightHouse Ventures, says: “Many companies are trying to address AI search, but Ranketta’s precision and product-level visibility set it apart. The company’s early growth, together with Vojtěch’s technical vision, are both highly impressive. With AI search set to influence hundreds of billions in consumer spending over the next few years, we see Ranketta emerging as a key player in this rapidly growing market.”

Data shows that 50% of consumers are already using AI-powered search to inform purchasing decisions, and 44% now rely on it more than Google.

Spending influenced by AI search is expected to reach €647 billion ($750 billion) by 2028, yet fewer than 40% of marketers list Generative Engine Optimization as a priority for their organisations, and just 16% of brands track their AI search performance at all.

This means brands can be highly visible on Google, but remain almost invisible inside LLMs if they don’t have the tools to understand what customers actually see.

Ranketta says they are the only software in Europe capable of measuring how often and how well individual products appear in answers generated by AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode and AI Overview.

The platform shows which individual items LLMs recommend most, why they appear, and how brands can improve their placement. Alongside product insights, Ranketta also tracks a brand’s overall presence in AI responses, including whether mentions are positive, how high the brand ranks, and how frequently it appears.

It also identifies the articles and sources these tools rely on when referencing a brand.

The platform includes an AI Copilot that reviews each brand’s data and provides tailored recommendations on what content to create and which citations or websites will have the biggest impact.

“Traditional SEO won’t define the next decade, AI visibility will. Ranketta is among the first platforms to clearly decode how AI models evaluate brands and products, giving companies the insight they need to grow in an AI-first marketplace,” said Damir Špoljarič, Founder and GP at Gi21 Capital.

The new funding will accelerate expansion across Europe, support its entry in the U.S. market, and grow its engineering, product, and sales teams. It will also advance development of Ranketta’s integrations with Shopify and other ecommerce platforms.

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