ChatFeatured
Toronto startup whose platform finds where a brand is missing from AI assistants' answers, then writes and publishes content to close the gaps. It announced a USD 2 million pre-seed round in July 2026.
Industry: AI search optimisation | Location: Toronto, Canada | Total Funding: USD 2M
About ChatFeatured
ChatFeatured is a Toronto-based company that sells an answer engine optimisation platform, which helps brands appear in answers from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Its website lists tools for tracking visibility, sentiment, share of voice and citations across AI engines, auditing sites, and generating and publishing content.
The platform works backward from the sources that large language models already cite, identifies where a brand is missing and where competitors are winning, builds a content strategy, writes and publishes content to close the gaps, and tracks the results. According to the company's press release, it launched in the first week of January 2026.
Farris Nasr is co-founder and chief executive, and Nithiiyan Skhanthan is co-founder and chief technology officer. The release says Nasr spent more than a decade in go-to-market roles before teaching himself to code, and that Skhanthan was an engineer at Tesla before early roles at venture-backed startups, including the Y Combinator-backed LifestyleRx. Ryan Nahas, a former head of SMB growth at Salesforce who first used the product as a customer, is the founding head of growth. The founders met at a Toronto Tech Week networking event.
The website names customers including Vessel, Cognito Health, Cyclr, CurrentWare and WikiSleep in testimonials. The release says customers are in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany, and that the company reports month-on-month growth above 40 percent. BetaKit put the team at five people, and LinkedIn lists two to ten employees. The company is advertising remote roles for a head of marketing and a founding engineer, open to candidates in the US or Canada.
On 22 July 2026 ChatFeatured announced an oversubscribed pre-seed round of 2 million US dollars, about 2.8 million Canadian dollars, up from a 1.5 million dollar target. Storytime Capital led the round, with Garage Capital and BY Venture Partners taking part. TechScoop describes BY Venture Partners as an Abu Dhabi and Lebanon-based fund.
The funds are for team growth, go-to-market expansion and an autonomous agent that would find visibility gaps and carry out optimisation work for marketing teams.
Leadership
- Farris Nasr, Chief executive
- Nithiiyan Skhanthan, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
- Farris Nasr, Chief executive
- Ryan Nahas, Founding head of growth
- Nithiiyan Skhanthan, Chief technology officer