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For two decades, marketers obsessed over a single question: where do we rank on Google? A growing number now ask a stranger one: what does ChatGPT say about us when we are not in the room?

The Wild Ventures, the Swedish-founded company behind home decor brand Wild Palace, is betting that question will turn into a budget line. On October 14, it launched Miracly, an AI marketing platform, after raising a US$2 million pre-seed round.

Also Read: The EU called ChatGPT a search engine. SEA’s AI startups should worry about what comes next

The round was led by Singapore-based BEENEXT and Lotus, with participation from a Swedish family office. Existing backers include Stefan Lindeberg, founder of Nordic VC firm Creandum, and Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of payroll and HR unicorn Deel. The company did not disclose a valuation.

From wallpaper to software

The launch marks a notable turn for a company that, until recently, described itself as a house of brands. When The Wild Ventures announced itself in April 2025, it closed a US$750,000 angel round at a post-money valuation of around US$7 million. The plan then was to use AI and sharp branding to shake up “stale but big” categories such as wallpaper, pet accessories and paper packaging, through brands including Wild Palace, Poositive Pets and Future Paper.

Miracly is a different animal. It is business software, sold to marketing teams rather than to shoppers.

The founding team helps explain the pivot, or at least the extension. Co-founders Arvid Lithander and Shannon Cullum come from advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden+Kennedy and MullenLowe, and are joined by Bjorn Bergstrom and Malin Renström. People who have spent careers fighting for share of voice tend to notice early when the arena moves.

The obvious sceptic’s question is whether a startup can build consumer brands and an enterprise software product at the same time on a pre-seed budget. The generous reading is that Wild Palace doubles as Miracly’s test lab: a live brand on which to try out AI visibility tactics before selling them to others. The company will need to show which reading is closer to the truth.

What Miracly actually does

Miracly said its software helps marketing teams track how brands appear on AI platforms and manage work across channels. In plain terms, it watches how chatbots and AI assistants describe and recommend a brand, then helps the team act on what it finds.

That second half matters. Monitoring alone is quickly becoming a commodity. The harder problem is turning “the chatbot thinks our rival is cheaper” into a coordinated response across a website, PR, social media and paid campaigns, without adding another tool to an already bloated.

Also Read: How earned media drives AI search visibility in ASEAN

Early customers include Acclime, an Asia-focused corporate services firm, and Pixi Beauty. The pairing is telling: one sells complex professional services, where buyers increasingly ask AI tools to compare providers; the other sells skincare, where an AI-generated product recommendation can make or break a purchase.

A crowded new channel

AI search is changing how brands are discovered online, handing marketers yet another channel to monitor and influence. When a user asks an assistant for the best accounting firm in Singapore or a moisturiser for humid weather, the answer usually arrives as a single synthesised reply rather than a page of links. A brand that is absent from that reply barely exists for that customer. It is why marketers have started asking what ChatGPT is saying behind their backs.

For Southeast Asia, the stakes are arguably higher. Discovery in the region is fragmented across languages, super apps and social commerce, and most brands already juggle multiple channels on thin teams. Adding AI answer engines to that mix is not optional, but it is not cheap either.

Miracly is far from alone. New York-based Profound is the category’s heavyweight: it raised a US$96 million Series C at a US$1 billion valuation in February, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins participating, and serves more than 700 enterprise customers. Industry reports say it followed that with a US$180 million Series D at a US$1.8 billion valuation in September. Y Combinator-backed AthenaHQ, founded by former Google Search engineer Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, came out of stealth in 2025 with US$2.2 million in seed funding and pitches a cheaper, self-serve alternative.

Against that backdrop, US$2 million is a modest war chest. Profound has already moved from tracking into agents that execute marketing tasks, which is precisely the “manage work across channels” territory Miracly is claiming. Competing on features with a company that had raised more than 75 times as much even before its latest round is a losing game. Miracly’s better bet may be geography and price: mid-market brands and Asian firms that Silicon Valley’s enterprise-first players are not prioritising.

That may also be what BEENEXT, which has a long record of backing early-stage startups across Asia, sees in the deal.

The question nobody has answered

There is a deeper uncertainty hanging over the whole category. Search engine optimisation worked because Google published rules, however vague, and the results could be measured. AI models are less predictable: answers shift with model updates, phrasing and even the user’s location. Selling the ability to “influence” those answers requires proof that customers can repeat, not just a dashboard of anecdotes.

Also Read: AI didn’t replace Southeast Asia’s marketing agencies, it repriced them

And as AI platforms experiment with paid placements, the organic window that tools such as Miracly promise to optimise could narrow. If AI search becomes another pay-to-play channel, the winners may be ad buyers, not optimisers.

For now, marketers are paying to find out what the machines think of them. As AI agents rewrite the growth marketing playbook, Miracly’s challenge is to prove that knowing the answer is only half the job, and that it can deliver the other half.

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