Hall raises $2M to build the infrastructure for the AI marketing channel

Today we’re sharing that Hall has raised $2 million from Blackbird Ventures to accelerate development of our AI marketing platform. This funding enables us to build the infrastructure that businesses need as AI platforms become the primary interface for customer discovery.

The search landscape is fragmenting

For two decades, Google’s dominance created a singular focus for businesses: optimize for search rankings. The $80+ billion SEO industry emerged around this premise, with entire workflows built around keywords, backlinks, and page authority.

This centralized model is breaking down. People are increasingly turning to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude for information. When someone asks an AI for restaurant recommendations or software comparisons, they're bypassing traditional search entirely. The responses are instant, personalized, and conversational—a fundamentally different experience from scanning through search results.

Search is fracturing across dozens of AI interfaces, each with different training data, user contexts, and recommendation patterns. Even as Google scrambles with AI overviews, this fragmentation appears inevitable as AI becomes embedded directly into products, devices, and workflows.

A new channel emerges

Every platform shift creates new marketing channels. Email enabled direct marketing. The App Store created mobile discovery ecosystems. Social media platforms reshaped performance marketing entirely. Conversational AI represents the next evolution in this progression.

But there’s a critical gap: businesses have no visibility into how they’re represented across these AI platforms. When an AI recommends a competitor or describes a product incorrectly, companies lack the tools to understand why or how to improve their presence.

Traditional SEO tools are fundamentally incompatible with this new landscape. They’re designed for page rankings and link authority, not for optimizing how AI models surface and reference information.

Looking to the future

Hall is building the foundational infrastructure for this emerging channel. Our platform helps companies understand how they appear across AI platforms, track how AI conversations translate to business outcomes, and optimize their presence in AI-generated responses.

The funding accelerates product development and enables us to expand our engineering team, which directly benefits our customers. We’re hiring experienced builders who understand both data infrastructure and performance marketing to build the most technically sophisticated platform in this space.

The shift from centralized search to distributed AI discovery is just beginning. This creates an entirely new performance marketing channel with different rules, different optimization strategies, and different success metrics.

Hall is building the platform that every business will need to succeed in this AI-first world. As conversational AI becomes the primary interface for information discovery, companies will need sophisticated tools to manage their presence across these platforms.

The infrastructure we’re building today will power how businesses leverage AI as a complete marketing channel tomorrow.