QueryLift Raises ¥100M Seed to Expand GEO Platform for AI Answer Visibility

QueryLift Secures ¥100 Million Seed Round

Tokyo-based QueryLift has raised a ¥100 million seed round to advance its generative engine optimization (GEO) platform, which helps organizations understand and improve how they appear inside AI-generated answers. The round was backed by Z Venture Capital and JAFCO Group Co., Ltd.

This seed financing follows a ¥25 million pre-seed round the company raised in 2025, signaling continued investor confidence in the emerging GEO category as AI assistants become a primary interface for information discovery.

What QueryLift Does

QueryLift operates a GEO platform that shows organizations how they are represented within AI-generated answers on services including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. The platform provides visibility into three core areas:

• Which questions trigger mentions of a brand or organization
• What sources the AI answers cite when generating responses
• How a brand is compared or recommended against competitors

As large language models and AI overviews increasingly mediate how users find and evaluate information, understanding these dynamics has become a new frontier for digital visibility. QueryLift positions itself at the center of that shift, offering organizations a way to measure and influence their presence in AI-generated outputs.

Traction Across Government and Enterprise

QueryLift has served political parties, government agencies, and large enterprises. Among its disclosed work is a project with the Liberal Democratic Party that raised the citation rate of the party's official website in AI answers by 2.7x over four months. That result illustrates the platform's practical application: not just monitoring AI mentions, but driving measurable improvements in how authoritative sources are surfaced by AI systems.

Serving political parties and government agencies suggests QueryLift's technology addresses high-stakes information environments where accuracy, source attribution, and visibility carry significant weight. The company's enterprise engagements indicate demand beyond the public sector as well.

Research Foundation

QueryLift's research team publishes in natural language processing and information retrieval, with a paper accepted at CIKM 2026. That academic grounding differentiates the company in a market where many tools are built on surface-level monitoring rather than deep retrieval and NLP expertise. The CIKM acceptance points to ongoing work at the intersection of how AI systems retrieve, rank, and cite sources.

Funding Details

• Round: Seed
• Amount: ¥100,000,000
• Date: September 17, 2026
• Investors: Z Venture Capital, JAFCO Group Co., Ltd.
• Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
• Prior round: ¥25 million pre-seed in 2025

The participation of JAFCO, one of Japan's largest and most established venture capital firms, alongside Z Venture Capital, provides both institutional backing and regional network depth. For a company selling into government agencies and large enterprises in Japan, that investor profile may matter as much as the capital itself.

Why This Matters for the GEO Category

Generative engine optimization is emerging as a distinct discipline as search behavior fragments across AI assistants and overviews. Traditional SEO focused on ranking in a list of links; GEO focuses on whether and how a brand appears inside a synthesized answer. QueryLift's platform addresses the measurement problem at the heart of that shift: organizations currently have limited visibility into why an AI system mentions them, which sources it trusts, and how they stack up against alternatives.

The company's combination of a commercial platform, government and enterprise deployments, and peer-reviewed research gives it a multi-layered position in the market. The new seed funding is expected to support continued development of the platform and expansion of its work with organizations navigating AI-mediated information environments.

Outlook

With AI answer engines becoming a default layer for information access, tools that quantify and improve brand presence within those answers are likely to see growing demand. QueryLift's early work with political and government clients, its measurable citation-rate improvements, and its research pipeline position it as a notable player in Japan's GEO landscape. The ¥100 million seed round, backed by JAFCO and Z Venture Capital, gives the company resources to build on that foundation.