The search game just hit a reset, and AirOps is calling the plays. The SF-based startup just banked $40M in Series B funding led by Greylock Partners, clocking in at a $225M valuation, and it’s not a quiet round. It’s validation that AirOps is building the content engineering platform every brand will need as AI search becomes the new front door to the internet. While most marketers are still asking how to rank on Google, AirOps is busy teaching ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini who deserves the spotlight. Led by Alex Halliday (CEO), Berna Gonzalez (CTO), & Matt Hammel (COO), this crew isn’t optimizing for clicks, they’re building visibility that speaks fluent AI.
Founded in early 2022, AirOps didn’t crawl; it sprinted. Halliday helped scale MasterClass from a $5M idea to $100M+ ARR, Gonzalez built the kind of engineering stack that hums at global scale, & Hammel turned Bungalow into an operational masterclass in systems & growth. They saw the shift coming, the fall of Google’s dominance (now below 90% global share) & the rise of conversational discovery where people ask, not search. AirOps turned that market chaos into a playbook, bridging data, content, & automation into one unified machine.
Greylock’s Mike Duboe summed it up: CMOs everywhere are in crisis mode. Billions of users are swapping keywords for prompts, & the old SEO tools just can’t hang. AirOps solves that with an all-in-one platform that identifies content gaps, generates optimized assets, ensures they’re on-brand, & publishes them, automatically. This isn’t a marketing tool; it’s a visibility engine built for a world where algorithms do the reading.
The proof’s in the data. Ramp, Chime, Carta, Webflow, Wiz & Klaviyo are already using AirOps to dominate AI search. Chime tripled AI search citations in 4 weeks. Carta saw a 7x lift on high-value queries. Deepgram’s traffic exploded 20x in 2 months. Lightspeed boosted conversion by 37%. These aren’t vanity metrics, they’re tectonic shifts in how brands get discovered. No wonder 24+ senior marketing execs jumped into this round as individual investors. When operators invest, it’s because they’ve lived the pain.
With a global team growing from 20 to 100 in ’25 & hubs in SF, NY, Miami, London & Bangalore, AirOps is scaling fast. The $40M will fuel 200+ hires, European expansion & relentless product innovation. But the bigger picture? AirOps isn’t chasing trends, it’s building the infrastructure for how visibility works when AI runs the table. In a world where discovery moves from links to language, AirOps isn’t guessing, it’s engineering the future of being found.
