Bear Bets That the Next Great Marketing Channel Is the AI Agent

For two decades, the marketing stack has been organized around a familiar funnel: someone searches Google, lands on a website, and converts through a carefully optimized series of pages. That funnel is starting to break. Increasingly, prospective customers do their research inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI agents – which then surface a small set of recommended products, often without the user ever visiting a traditional search results page. Bear, a Y Combinator Fall 2025 startup based in San Francisco, is building a generative engine optimization platform designed for that new reality.

Bear helps companies capture and convert the highest-intent leads on the internet – visitors who arrive by clicking through from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI agents. The company’s pitch is that a click from an AI agent represents qualitatively different intent than a click from a generic search result: by the time a user follows an agent’s recommendation, they have typically asked a detailed question, evaluated multiple options through the agent, and made a deliberate choice to investigate further. Bear’s platform owns the entire funnel from agent discovery – making sure a company shows up well inside agent responses – to conversion on the destination experience, treating AI-driven traffic as a first-class channel rather than a footnote on existing analytics dashboards.

The market opportunity is being created in real time. Consumer behavior data from publishers, e-commerce platforms, and SaaS vendors all point to the same trend: AI assistants are absorbing a growing share of top-of-funnel research, and the conventions for how brands optimize for that channel are still being written. Search engine optimization, schema markup, and content marketing all evolved over years to fit how Google ranked and rendered results; the equivalent best practices for AI agents are barely a year old, and the rules change with every model update. Bear is positioning its generative engine optimization platform as the managed marketing surface for businesses that want intent-rich AI traffic without staffing up a research team to reverse-engineer algorithms that change with every model update.

Bear was founded in 2025 by Janak Sunil and Siddhant Paliwal. Sunil, the company’s CEO, previously worked at Coinbase and founded UCLA’s largest apartment listing platform, which was later acquired. Paliwal, the CTO, previously worked at Third Chair, a YC X25 company, and at Intel, and founded his first company at 15 – work that earned him an invitation to speak at the United Nations. Their shared experience operating at the intersection of growth, infrastructure, and AI gives Bear an unusually well-matched founding profile for the problem.