Pre-Seed Round Open  ·  Q2 2026

$155 million has been raised
to monitor AI search.
Not one dollar has been raised to fix it. Until now.
Caijo is the fix.

The world's first AEO scoring platform. Real crawler. 100-point diagnostic. The specific content brands need to earn AI citations. 5,000 scans before a single marketing dollar spent. We are raising $1.5M to own the category before it consolidates.

5,000+
Scans to date
Word of mouth only
$1.5M
Raise
Pre-seed · 20% equity
$7.5M
Valuation
Category first-mover
Zero
Direct competitors
No AEO scanner exists

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The Market Opportunity

The numbers that make serious investors pay attention.

Every major investor in tech is putting money into AI search. The SEO software market is already worth $85 billion. AEO is the next layer. It does not exist yet as a scored, diagnostic platform. That is the gap Caijo fills.

$85B
SEO software market today

The global SEO software market is valued at $84.94 billion in 2025, growing at 13.26% CAGR toward $295 billion by 2035. AEO sits on top of this market as the next mandatory layer. Every brand that buys SEO tools will need AEO tools. That is the addressable base Caijo is entering.

2,000%
G2 AEO category growth in 10 months

G2 launched the AEO software category in March 2025 with 7 products. By January 2026, it had grown to over 150 products. By April 2026, 248 listings. This is the fastest-growing software category on G2. The market is forming now. The diagnostic layer has no clear leader.

25%
Traditional search traffic shifting to AI by 2026

Gartner predicts 25% of organic search traffic will shift to AI chatbots and virtual assistants by 2026. For the first time since 2015, Google's search market share has dropped below 90%. ChatGPT serves 800 million weekly users. The shift is not coming. It is already here.

Source: Gartner, confirmed by multiple independent analyses, 2025
$150B+ invested in AI in 2025 alone

In 2025, top AI startups raised nearly $150 billion, accounting for more than 40% of global venture capital. OpenAI raised $40B at a $300B valuation. Anthropic raised $13B. a16z raised a $10B mega-fund with AI as its core thesis. YC, a16z, and OpenAI backing AI search infrastructure is a signal your investment committee should be tracking.

Source: Multiple VC data sources, 2025
50% of B2B buyers now start with AI, not Google

According to a G2 survey, half of B2B software buyers now begin their purchasing journey in an AI chatbot instead of a traditional Google search. 74% use ChatGPT specifically. The brands that are cited in those answers control the deal before the conversation even starts. AEO is not a future problem. It is today's revenue risk.

Source: G2 survey, August 2025
69% of Google searches end without a click in 2025

Zero-click searches went from 56% in 2024 to 69% in 2025. AI Overviews now answer queries before users visit any website. The value of appearing in those answers is enormous. The value of not appearing is invisible revenue loss. Caijo is the first tool that tells brands exactly why they are not appearing and exactly what to do about it.

Source: CXL, January 2026
Adobe acquired Semrush in November 2025

Adobe's acquisition of Semrush, the world's leading SEO platform, confirms that AI-era search visibility tools are strategic acquisitions, not niche products. Semrush was valued at approximately $2.5 billion at the time of acquisition. Caijo is building the AEO diagnostic layer that Semrush does not have. The acquisition signal could not be clearer.

Source: SkyQuest Research, February 2026

The AEO Funded Market

$174 million has proven the category.
None of it built the diagnostic layer.

Profound and Scrunch raised serious money from serious investors to monitor AI search. They tell you the symptom. They cannot treat the cause. No crawler. No scoring model. No fix instructions. No CiteReady. The diagnostic half of the AEO market has never been funded. That is where Caijo lives.

Monitoring only
Profound
$155M
Seed $3.5M · Series A $20M · Series B $35M · Series C $96M
Unicorn status Feb 2026 · Led by Sequoia, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins
+
Monitoring only
Scrunch AI
$19M
Seed $4M · Series A $15M
Led by Decibel, Mayfield, Homebrew
=
Category validated
Total raised
$174M
To monitor AI search.
Zero raised to diagnose and fix it.
The diagnostic layer
Caijo
$1.5M
Pre-seed raise · 20% equity
The gap neither Profound nor Scrunch can fill.
What $174 million bought. And what it couldn't.
Profound
$155M raised
Scrunch AI
$19M raised
Caijo
Raising $1.5M
Monitors AI citations and mentions
Real web crawler visiting actual pages
100-point AEO scoring model
Plain English fix instructions per failure
CiteReady: generates citable content passages
Only tool
Tells you WHY you are not being cited
Tells you WHAT to write to fix it
Agency workflow: white-label, projects, competitor compare
Entry price
$499/mo
$300/mo
Free

The Investment Thesis in One Paragraph

Profound proved investors will back AI search visibility tools at a $1 billion valuation. Scrunch proved there is a second tier of the market willing to pay. Both of them built dashboards that tell brands what already happened. Neither of them can crawl a website, score its AEO readiness, tell a brand exactly what is broken, or generate the specific content it needs to get cited. That capability does not exist anywhere in the market at any price point. Caijo built it. The monitoring market is funded, validated, and consolidating. The diagnostic market is open, unfunded, and waiting for a first mover. Caijo is raising $1.5M to be that first mover before the window closes.

The Competitive Gap

The funded market is solving the second problem.
Caijo solves the first.

What every other tool does
Monitoring tools: they tell you the symptom.
  • Sends prompts to AI engines to see what they say about you
  • Tracks citation frequency and brand mentions
  • Measures share of voice against competitors
  • Reports what already happened, after the fact
  • Cannot tell you why you are not being cited
  • Cannot tell you what to write to fix it

Otterly · Profound · Scrunch · HubSpot AEO Grader · Conductor

What only Caijo does
The diagnostic layer: Caijo treats the cause.
  • CaijoBot crawls the actual website, up to 100 pages per scan
  • Scores AEO readiness across 7 categories with a 100-point model
  • Plain English fix instructions for every failure: specific, not vague
  • CiteReady generates the specific content brands need to earn citations
  • Agency workflow: white-label reports, projects, competitor comparison
  • Use Caijo first. Use monitoring tools after. That is the complete workflow.

The Product

Built. Working. Growing without marketing.

Caijo is not a concept. It is a live platform with real users running real scans on real websites. The MVP is done. This raise funds the rebuild, the team, and the market capture.

01
Real Web Crawler

CaijoBot visits up to 100 pages per scan, extracts 18 AEO signals per page, rotates Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari fingerprints, and stores the full page body text for CiteReady analysis. No other AEO tool at any price point has a crawler this deep.

02
100-Point Scoring Engine

Seven weighted categories: Structured Data, Content Structure, Technical Access, Entity Clarity, Trust Signals, Topical Depth, and Freshness. Every check has explicit pass, warning, and fail logic. Every failure has a plain English fix instruction. A completely deterministic, auditable model.

03
CiteReady

The only feature of its kind anywhere in the market. CiteReady generates 115-180 word citable passages in the brand's own voice, directly addressing the citation gaps on their Key Pages. Written by the same AI that decides who to cite. Shipped 28 April 2026 on the live platform.

Traction

5,000 scans. Zero marketing spend. One word: mouth.

Caijo launched in beta in late April 2026. Everything that has happened since has been entirely organic. The product is working. This raise funds the acceleration, not the validation.

5,000+
Scans completed

Since beta launch. Word of mouth only. Zero paid acquisition. The product spreads because it answers a question every brand has and nobody else answers.

800+
Registered users

Before the public marketing site has even launched. Every user found Caijo organically. That is the conversion signal a pre-seed investor needs to see.

26 May
Public launch date

Caijo.com launches publicly on 26 May 2026. Free, PRO+, and AGENCY plans. Caijo Studio alongside it. The marketing engine starts on launch day.

The Raise

$1.5M to turn a working MVP into the category platform.

Caijo launches 26 May 2026. This raise funds the full product rebuild onto a premium, scalable tech stack, a CTO and engineering team, and the $375k performance marketing budget deployed by someone who has spent three decades doing exactly this.

The category is forming now. The product is live and validated by 5,000 scans with zero marketing spend. The window to own the AEO scanner category before it consolidates is open today. The pre-seed investor's 20% stake becomes significantly more valuable at the $5M seed round when Caijo hits $27k MRR by end of 2026.

At $27k MRR, Caijo raises a $5M seed at a $25M valuation. That is a 3.3x return on this round's $7.5M valuation in 24 months. For the right partner, this is the call to make.

28%
CTO, engineering team, platform rebuildFull rebuild onto a scalable tech stack. $420,000.
25%
Performance marketing and authority buildingPaid acquisition, content, SEO, and brand authority. $375,000.
20%
Team, UAE or GCC office, operationsOffice, salaries, visas, tools. $300,000.
17%
Tech infrastructure and CiteReady scalingVPS, Claude API, crawler infrastructure. $255,000.
10%
Legal, accounting, contingencyEntity setup, contracts, buffer. $150,000.
$1.5M
Raise
20%
Equity offered
$7.5M
Pre-seed valuation
24mo
Runway

The 24-month milestone

Seed-round ready at $27k MRR.

500 PRO+ subscribers at $39/month plus 50 AGENCY subscribers at $149.99/month. Target: end of 2026. At that number, Caijo raises a $5M seed at a $25M valuation. Your 20% pre-seed stake at a $7.5M valuation has become significantly more valuable.

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The Team

Built by people who have done this before.

Between us, more than four decades of marketing, SEO, and AEO experience across some of the most competitive industries on the planet.

Founder and CEO
Jaymes Payten

26 years in global marketing. CMO at FxPro, Exness, FXTM, 3CX, and Acunetix. Took Tony Robbins from 1,000 to 10,000 seats across the UK and Germany. Built and ran the certification programme at 3CX and Acunetix that became one of the most powerful growth engines in the business. Based between Cyprus and Dubai with a decade of GCC relationships.

LinkedIn
Head of Product
Jo Stavraki

10+ years building digital products from concept to launch across competitive markets. Combines deep technical understanding with the instinct to know what users actually need. Seasoned SEO and AEO specialist, which means Caijo's product decisions are driven by someone who understands both the user and the algorithm at the same time.

LinkedIn
Head of AEO
Nader Aboulhosn

15 years as a CMO, marketer, SEO expert, and growth strategist across highly competitive digital categories. Recognised AEO authority since 2022. Leads the scoring methodology and category positioning that powers every Caijo scan. The person who built the intellectual framework Caijo runs on.

LinkedIn

Brands we have helped grow

Real Madrid Tony Robbins FXTM FxPro Exness 3CX Acunetix GTC

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