London startup Obsero has raised €1 million in a seed round led by SFC Capital, with several of its own customers also putting money in. The company tracks how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews describe brands and which sources those answers cite, a question that matters most in markets where customers compare before they commit, such as lending, trading and online casinos.
The round was announced on 13th October. Ed Stevenson, fund principal at SFC Capital, described AI assistants as “quickly becoming the new front door to the internet”, and the investment is a bet that brands will pay to know what is said about them there.
Ten Million AI Answers in Its First Year
Obsero was founded in 2025 by chief executive Mike Logue and chief product officer Andy Francos, who met at IG Group in 2019. The company says it has analysed more than 10 million AI answers in its first year and pairs its platform with a senior consultancy team.
Its named clients include Zopa Bank and Pepperstone, with the agencies IDHL and Silverbean working with it as partners. That client list sits in finance, but the same tracking applies to any market where review sites shape the answer, and online casinos are one of the clearest.
The Sources Matter as Much as the Answer
Obsero’s platform records which pages an assistant draws on, not just whether a brand is mentioned. That distinction matters because an AI answer is only as favourable as the third-party material behind it, and for most brands that material sits on sites they do not own.
In traditional search, a brand could at least see where its own pages ranked and work to move them up. In an AI answer, the assistant writes its own summary from several sources, so a brand can be described without its own site being quoted at all.
Online gambling shows how this works in practice. When an assistant compares operators such as BetMGM, FanDuel or Caesars Palace, independent casino reviews are among the sources it can draw on, along with what those reviews say. An operator can control its own site, but it has far less say over how outside reviewers rate its withdrawals, games and support.
Lenders and brokers face the same structure with comparison sites and customer forums. In each case the brand’s visibility in an AI answer depends partly on pages it does not write, which is the gap Obsero argues cannot be measured by hand.
Trustpilot Shows What Being Cited Is Worth
The clearest evidence of the stakes comes from a review platform. Trustpilot reported click-throughs from AI search up 1,490% year on year, and said it was the fifth-most-cited domain on ChatGPT globally in January.
Being cited has not made the share price any easier to manage. Its half-year revenue rose 23%, yet the shares fell as much as 20% on the day as investors had hoped for upgraded guidance.
The underlying numbers were strong. Revenue for the six months to 30th June reached £151.4 million, adjusted EBITDA rose 46% to £26.3 million and profit before tax was up 32% at £4.3 million, figures that show citations turning into money for a company of around 1,000 staff.
Trustpilot hosts reviews of banks, retailers and casino operators alike, which is part of why assistants quote it so often. A brand far smaller than Trustpilot will start from far fewer citations, which is the market Obsero is selling into.
The Money Goes on AI Agents
Obsero will spend the round on its first specialist AI agents, built on the methods it has developed from client work, as well as doubling its engineering team and speeding up its go-to-market plans. It joins a busy field, with Searchable raising €11.9 million and geoSurge €10 million for tools that measure how brands appear in AI answers.
Searchable’s round went into its AI-led search performance platform, while geoSurge is building technology aimed at how brands are represented inside generative AI systems. Obsero’s pitch is narrower, focusing on the sources behind each answer rather than the answer alone.
“I’ve never seen the ground move this quickly,” Francos said. Logue said that “AI is changing how people discover brands faster than any shift I’ve seen in marketing.”
For an online casino brand, the pages the assistants keep returning to are mostly review sites and player forums outside its control. Obsero’s first agents will show whether that citation data can be turned into something a marketing team acts on.
That is why the gambling sector is a natural early test for this kind of tool. Operators already spend heavily on being found, and the sources that assistants trust most are often the ones a casino brand has the least influence over.