Today, I’m excited to announce daydream’s $2.5M pre-seed from Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, SOMA Capital, Hustle Fund, and current and former growth leaders at companies like Dropbox, Airtable, and Notion. Read on for details about our thesis and the details of our round.

Additional resources:

• Our exclusive with Axios.

• The daydream founding story.

A new generation of search

For the past twenty years, Google has held a virtual monopoly on answering the world’s questions. That seems destined to change over the coming decade as LLMs redefine our expectations for how questions are answered. Incumbents (Google, Microsoft) will adapt their existing products to improve the quality of their answers while new entrants (Anthropic, OpenAI, others) threaten to disrupt them. If search was a unipolar landscape for the past twenty years, the next twenty promise to be multipolar.

A new generation of SEO

As LLMs change the way searches are served, it’s also inducing a significant change the way content is produced. If 90%+ of content produced for SEO purposes is created manually right now, with <10% being produced programmatically, we believe this ratio will flip within the next five years.

The reason for this is simple: when companies invest in content, they care about three key factors — quality, cost of production, and production speed. While LLMs produce content cheaply and with great speed, none of that matters if the quality does not beat what the content marketer on your internal team produces.

As LLMs continue to improve and workflows are built to effectively provide LLMs with access all the company-specific context a human has access to — either information on the public web or data inside the company — we should approach a point where AI-generated content matches, or exceeds the capability of what an in-house team member can write.

Similar advancements in efficiency will be seen at each link of the SEO chain — from identifying the right keywords at scale to monitoring and reporting on performance to updating that content automatically.

daydream and our recent fundraise

daydream is building a SaaS platform to realize and deliver those advancements to customers now. To do this, we raised $2.5M from an outstanding set of investors including:

• Funds: Basis Set Ventures (Lan Xuezhao), Hustle Fund (Eric Bahn), SOMA Capital (Willem van den Bosch), Moth Fund (Molly Mielke), Picks and Shovels (Josh Schlisserman) and Autopilot Ventures (Hari Raghavan).

• Growth Leaders: Lauryn Isford (Head of Product Growth at Notion), Melissa Tan (former Head of Growth at Webfow), Bryan Tsao (former VP of Growth at Dropbox), David Hoang (VP Marketing at Replit), and Michelle Lim (Growth Lead at Warp).

• SEO Leaders: Eli Schwartz (Author of Product-Led SEO and former Director of SEO at Survey Monkey), Nikolas Baron (former Head of SEO at Grammarly), David Ly Khim (Co-Founder, Omniscient).

• Other great angels: Lenny Rachitsky (of Lenny’s Newsletter), Cailen DSa (Co-Founder, Neo.Tax), Austen Allred, Cyrus Shirazi (former Director of GTM at Meow), Varun Anand (Head of Ops at Clay), Jason Zhang (VP of Product at Mesh), Tony Huie (CEO at Twingate), and many others.

Talk to us!

We’re still in stealth, but if you’re interested in using daydream and joining our growing list of customers we work closely with, please shoot me an email at [email protected]. 🙂