BY Venture Partners Backs Canadian AI Startup ChatFeatured in $2M Round

Abdelrahman Amr

Last updated 26-07-2026

3 min

Abu Dhabi’s BY Venture Partners joined a $2m oversubscribed pre-seed round.

Canadian startup ChatFeatured targets “Answer Engine Optimisation” for generative AI platforms.

The platform automates content gaps, publishing, and tracks AI-driven citations growth.

It operates in five markets, claiming 40% month-on-month growth.

The deal highlights Abu Dhabi’s push into frontier AI infrastructure.

Abu Dhabi-based BY Venture Partners has joined a $2 million oversubscribed pre-seed round in Canadian AI startup ChatFeatured, signalling once again how serious regional investors are about backing the next wave of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The round was led by Storytime Capital, with Garage Capital also taking part. Interestingly, the company had first set out to raise $1.5 million, but strong investor appetite pushed the total up to $2 million. Not bad for a startup that only launched six months ago.

ChatFeatured is building software designed to help brands appear more prominently inside generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. If traditional search was about SEO, this new layer is being called Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. In simple terms, instead of chasing Google rankings, companies now want to be cited directly inside AI-generated answers. And that’s a whole new ball game.

Founded in January 2026 by Farris Nasr, Nithiiyan Skhanthan and Ryan Nahas, ChatFeatured automates much of this optimisation process. Its platform analyses which sources large language models rely on, spots gaps in content, suggests editorial angles, generates material, publishes it, and then tracks improvements in AI-driven visibility. It’s quite comprehensive — well… I mean, it doesn’t just stop at analytics dashboards like many older SEO tools do.

The startup says it has expanded into five markets already: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. Month-on-month growth has reportedly exceeded 40%, and every customer using the platform has seen improvements in AI citations and referral traffic. That’s a bold claim, but it underlines how quickly generative AI is shifting product discovery and purchasing behaviour.

The fresh capital will go towards growing the team, accelerating go-to-market efforts and building what the company describes as an autonomous AI agent capable of managing AEO on behalf of marketing teams. If that vision works out, marketing departments might soon have one less thing to faff about with.

For BY Venture Partners, headquartered in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the deal fits neatly into its strategy of investing in early-stage companies with global scaling potential. The firm focuses on connecting international founders with capital and networks across the Middle East and North Africa. The founders of ChatFeatured reportedly stood out for their speed of execution and clarity of vision — two qualities that, from what we’ve seen at Arageek covering early-stage startups, can make or break a young company.

And here’s the bigger picture. AI search is evolving fast. Startups that build infrastructure around it are increasingly attractive to investors who believe that consumer habits are shifting for good. On the flip side, it’s still an emerging category, and AEO could take time to become as standardised as SEO once did. I reckon we are still in the experimental phase, but the direction of travel seems spot on.

Either way, the investment reinforces Abu Dhabi’s growing role as a gateway for venture capital into frontier technologies. For founders across MENA watching this space, it’s a reminder that the AI infrastructure race is definately on — and regional capital wants a seat at the table.

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