Today, I’m announcing Daydream’s $3.8M seed, led by First Round Capital and with participation from existing investors Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, and Hustle Fund.

Building for a new era of search

Despite the fear and uncertainty expressed by many in the SEO community, we see search entering a golden era, full of innovation and new possibilities for reaching customers more thoughtfully and efficiently. In the last six months alone, Google launched its AI snippet to the masses, OpenAI made significant progress in developing its own web search product, and Perplexity moved vertically into publishing content rather than just indexing and searching for it.

At daydream, we’re committed to building tools to help businesses navigate this changing search landscape, starting with automating programmatic SEO from start to finish.

Accelerating our path forward

Since announcing our pre-seed less than six months ago, we’ve received a level of interest from customers that we did not anticipate. The concept of using AI in SEO, which felt “risky” even a year ago, is now gaining acceptance rapidly, even among the most conservative and risk-averse businesses. As more SEO becomes programmatic, we expect this level of sustained interest to continue.

To meet the demand, we’ve spent the last several months building an outstanding founding team, investing in core R&D for the daydream product, and working closely with a handful of exceptional customers like Notion, ProductHunt, and Tome to build a best-in-class product for the industry.

Partnering with First Round

First Round Capital (FRC) is among the earliest investors in Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square. Our Partner at FRC, Todd Jackson, impressed us with his methodical approach to achieving product-market fit and willingness to get into the details of our business. We’re beyond excited to continue working with him.

"Ever since SEO started, it's been a services-heavy market. daydream's approach to automate and make great SEO possible via LLMs makes complete sense — and it's clearly solving a huge pain point for their customers," said Todd Jackson, Partner at First Round. "We're incredibly excited to partner with Thenuka and the daydream team as they help customers enter this new era of search." - Todd Jackson, Partner at First Round Capital

Get in touch

daydream will continue to be in stealth, and customers will be onboarded selectively for the foreseeable future. If you want to work with us, email me at [email protected] or DM on Twitter @thenuka_k.