How did you discover PreSeed Now? For an increasing number of our readers, that answer would be ‘ChatGPT’.

Yes, AI-driven content discovery is an increasingly important concern for publishers and brands.

Today’s startup is joining a busy market of tools to help businesses in this space, and Elelem thinks it has an edge over its rivals.

Read on to find out why, and to hear about a previously unreported pre-seed investment in the startup from SVV.

– Martin

Elelem wants to help you get talked about more often by AI chatbots and search engines

AI chatbots have so far only replaced a small amount of search activity. But the AI search market is growing, and the race is on to prepare for a day when many users turn to an LLM for the majority of their queries.

How can publishers and brands understand how they’re performing as citations in AI-generated answers? And how can they make sure they’re maximising this opportunity?

That’s where a bunch of AI optimisation tools want to step in and become the new version of traditional SEO.

Elelem is a startup that has entered the fray by promising to “elevate your brand's visibility in AI-driven search.”

How does it do that? The first part is something a lot of companies are doing right now: monitoring how visible a brand is in AI answers.

Elelem will fire queries including popular search terms related to the brand at the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. It can then check how many times a brand is mentioned in an answer, or cited as a linked source.

“That’s table stakes, every tool has this. Some tools offer generic advice to improve a page by improving the formatting, for example, but then we take it further,” explains Elelem co-founder and CTO Tom Wilson.

“We automatically identify which queries based on search keywords are performing badly on your site. We analyse all of the content on your website, so we have a deeper and less superficial view than some of the tools, in order to understand what you could specifically do on your website.

“That means which pages you could be thinking about improving, the ones that are closest to the query that could, just with a small amount of effort, be improved.”

Elelem then generates a ‘content brief’ which lists the most effective changes you can make to improve your performance in AI answers. Perhaps more usefully, it tells you how to make those changes.

“We look at content elsewhere that is doing really well, and suggest what you should consider including in the page that you already have, or in a page you should create. We're not taking away the steering wheel. We're just putting the destination in the GPS and saying ‘we'll help you get there’,” Wilson explains.

He adds that while Elelem has developed an automated content creation option, existing and potential customers don’t seem particularly interested in that option.

“People really want to maintain control of the process,” Wilson explains.

Elelem then tracks the success of these changes over time, so users can see how effective their work (and Elelem as a tool) has been.

While much of the market focuses on simulating queries, Elelem wants to focus on using real queries made to AI chatbots.

“We built the tool the way we did to have the ability to capture real queries, and that's something we'll double and triple down on as the market evolves, so that we're helping companies based on real data, not simulation,” says Wilson’s fellow co-founder, and the CEO at Elelem, Tom Salvat.

The story so far

Salvat and Wilson first met in Montreal around a decade ago, as two Brits in the Canadian tech scene.

At the time, Salvat had recently left marketing software company Optimizely, where he had been global senior vice president. He was developing a new startup idea when he was introduced to Wilson, who had been trying to develop an ‘answers engine’ (sound familiar?) long before today’s AI chatbots emerged, but seeing little interest in the idea.

Together, they worked as CEO (Salvat) and CTO (Wilson) to build a startup called Concured, which was focused on content recommendation tech.

“At one point we were at nearly 40 people doing some really clever things, working with some huge brands. But it was a very difficult business to scale, especially around the time that ChatGPT was launched,” Salvat says.

Despite having to close the business, the pair saw the upside of their experience with Concured in the new era of AI.

“We had an almost 10-year head start on understanding content and how content is created and analysed and adapted, and how people read. We looked at ChatGPT and felt that if it became a search engine like Google, there was going to be a whole market around it. And how do companies evaluate if they're visible, how they're visible, how they influence their visibility?”

Elelem launched as a commercial product over the summer of 2025. Salvat says he’s pleased with growth so far. He says there are a number of “large enterprise customers” they can’t name yet using the product.

The pair are currently working with an outsourced development team to build out the product further.

“I think most of the market is currently thinking to themselves, ‘we should look at this, we should talk about this. I can see how this is going to impact us, if not immediately, in the very near future.’

“We want to be there to help educate and inform them, and change their situation and optimise it,” Salvat says.

Go deeper on Elelem

Funding:

Elelem raised a small friends-and-family round at the start of its journey. It was then mostly self-funded by Salvat and Wilson, until this summer when they raised a previously unreported £510,000 pre-seed round from SVV.

This round brings the total raised to date to £660,000.

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