Yolando, a Competitive Intelligence and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Platform, Today Announced Its Official Commercial Launch With $8.5M USD in Total Cumulative Funding From Drive Capital

By uniting real-time competitor tracking, performance insights, and on-brand content creation, Yolando helps marketing teams shape LLM recommendations and the buyers who act on them.

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yolando, a competitive intelligence and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform, today announced its official commercial launch with $8.5M USD in total funding from Drive Capital. The platform helps companies understand how they appear in AI-generated answers and take action to improve visibility across both AI platforms and traditional search.

Yolando combines continuous competitor monitoring, strategic recommendations, and on-brand content generation. This gives marketing teams clear visibility into where performance is won or lost and the ability to act on those insights at scale. Yolando exists to help companies thrive, grow and maintain their competitive advantages.

Buyer behavior has fundamentally shifted. Before visiting a website, booking a call, or clicking an ad, prospects increasingly ask ChatGPT and other AI tools for recommendations. The answer often determines which brands make the shortlist and which are never considered at all.

This shift impacts every business that depends on being found and chosen, from B2B SaaS companies competing for enterprise deals to service-based organizations where trust, reputation, and search visibility drive growth. Whether it’s a law firm, a healthcare provider, or a financial services organization, the challenge is the same: when AI answers "who's the best in my area," they need to appear in that response.

Yolando was built by marketers who experienced this shift firsthand. Founder and CEO Matt Bogoroch also leads BirdseyePost, a high-growth marketing software company navigating the same AI-driven changes reshaping how buyers discover and evaluate brands. As AI began influencing which companies made the shortlist, the team discovered that existing tools could measure visibility, but not help them respond in a meaningful, scalable way.

When they couldn’t find a tool that effectively showed both what competitors were doing and how to respond, they built the Yolando platform. In production use, Yolando reduced demand generation friction, improved visibility in AI-generated answers, and increased conversion performance, all while allowing marketing teams to focus less on manual research and more on execution. For BirdseyePost, inbound leads from ChatGPT were worth an average of 20% more in revenue and the deals closed 40% faster relative to referrals or leads from Google or outbound sales motions.

What began as an internal solution is now being made available to other teams facing similar challenges.

"Before a prospect ever visits your website, they've already asked ChatGPT who to trust," said Bogoroch. "If you're not in that answer, you're not in the conversation. Yolando makes sure you are."

The same team that developed Yolando continues to run and scale BirdseyePost. Both companies operate under one roof, giving the Yolando platform a rare advantage: it will be continuously refined inside a high-growth business that’s navigating AI-driven buyer behavior every day.

How Yolando Differs from Competitors

While dozens of companies are racing into the GEO space, Yolando's approach is unique. Rather than building another dashboard that highlights problems without providing a solution, Yolando combines competitive intelligence with content generation tools so marketers can take immediate action.

"Most tools in this space tell you that you're losing," said Bogoroch. "They show you charts and rankings and sentiment scores, but leave you to figure out what to do about it. We built Yolando to close that loop, to show you what competitors are doing, tell you exactly how to beat them, and help you execute in minutes, not weeks."

The platform's recommendation engine drives this:

• Identifies every new piece of on-site content published by competitors and develops a strategic response and action plan
• Alerts when competitors gain visibility on high-intent search terms and prompts, so marketers can respond before those prompts start driving demand elsewhere.
• Flags any drops in brand sentiment or ranking, so teams can correct the narrative before it costs you deals
• Identifies content gaps that keeps brands out of AI responses, so businesses know exactly what to publish and when
• Generates publish-ready content briefs in one click so creative teams can drive consistency across all marketing projects

Technology

Underpinning Yolando is a proprietary model trained on millions of webpages to recognize patterns that drive AI citation and recommendation behavior. The model identifies why specific LLMs choose to cite certain companies over others and translates those patterns into actionable guidance and content.

"Traditional AI-generated content often just parrots existing sources, which means it gets ignored by the very models it's trying to influence," said Shardul Frey, Co-Founder & CTO. "We trained our system to identify patterns that actually drive LLM citation behavior, so every piece of content Yolando generates introduces something genuinely new to the conversation."

The platform orchestrates more than 40 specialized agents, handling research, competitive analysis, fact-checking, and formatting to produce publication-ready content in minutes. Real-time intelligence flows back to sharpen the model further, creating a compounding advantage for customers over time.

About Yolando

Yolando is a competitive intelligence and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform that helps brands understand how they’re represented in AI-generated answers and what they can do to shape those responses. The platform monitors visibility and competitive positioning across leading AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Serving B2B SaaS companies, service-based organizations, consumer, retail, Shopify ecommerce and any business where visibility and reputation drive growth. Yolando combines continuous competitor monitoring, actionable recommendations, and AI powered content generation - aligned to each brand’s unique voice - to help companies win in the age of AI search. Learn more at yolando.com.

About Drive Capital

Drive Capital is a Columbus-based venture capital firm that is investing in the world’s next generation of market-defining companies. Since Drive's inception in 2013, the firm has raised $2B of funds to invest in startups solving important problems in large markets. Drive is an investor in more than 100 companies outside of Silicon Valley, including Duolingo, Branch, Greenlight, and Path Robotics.