Hexagon raises R$10M seed led by Pear VC to scale GEO — SEO for the AI era
What's the deal? HexagonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a startup founded by Brazilian entrepreneur Ramon Silva, has raised R$10M in a seed round led by Pear VC, the Silicon Valley early-stage fund known for backing DoorDash, Cognition, and Gusto. The company builds Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) technology — essentially SEO for the AI era — that helps brands appear in answers generated by platforms like ChatGPT.
Silva previously founded AvocadoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a dark-store startup that became the basis for Rappi's Turbo delivery service after the Colombian super-app acquired it.
Why now? As consumers increasingly turn to AI chatbots instead of traditional search engines, brands face a new visibility challenge: being understood, referenced, and prioritised by large language models. Hexagon wants to own that emerging category before it becomes obvious to the broader market.
"We're living through the biggest shift in how discovery works on the internet since Google," Silva said. "Brands that aren't understood by these models simply cease to exist in this new environment."
In Brazil, Hexagon already counts Loft, Getnet, Buser, BTG Pactual, and Tako as clients. It has not disclosed US customers, revenue, or growth targets.
What could go wrong? The GEO market is nascent, which means Hexagon must spend heavily on evangelising the concept — convincing brands that optimising for AI responses is a necessity, not a luxury. The company also faces the risk that AI platforms themselves could change how they surface recommendations, potentially undermining third-party optimisation tools overnight.
Silva acknowledged the challenge, saying the team deliberately invested in technology and infrastructure before scaling headcount. "We chose to build a robust solution for a problem that is only emerging now," he said.
The signal: Hexagon's bet extends beyond GEO. It is already working on strategies around the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which lets consumers complete purchases directly inside AI chat interfaces. The broader market projections are eye-catching: Bain estimates agentic commerce could reach $300B to $500B in the US by 2030, while McKinsey pegs the figure at up to $1T in B2C retail alone.
The seed round reflects growing investor conviction that the shift from search-engine rankings to AI-generated answers will reshape digital marketing — and that the startups building picks-and-shovels tooling for that transition stand to capture outsized value.
Read more: startups.com.br
