A platform your marketing team operates, plus an embedded Forward Deployed Marketer who executes it alongside them — co-equal. Agents do the volume; the FDM owns the outcome. Replaces the agency check at ~1/4 the cost.
AI search is the largest discovery shift since Google itself. Every company doing SEO has to rebuild their playbook in the next 24 months — and the SEO industry was not built for it. Whoever owns the new playbook owns the market.
Even teams with real SEO skill get stranded between the two: the tool won't execute, and the agency that will is opaque, slow, and learning AI search as it goes.
Nobody is happy with their SEO agency.
3–6 month ramp, no real transparency into the work, generic playbooks. Nobody is happy — and nobody has a credible alternative.
Agencies are learning AI search on the customer's dime. The work is expanding faster than headcount can absorb.
Connect your domain and accounts. Agents do the volume on a platform your team operates; an embedded Forward Deployed Marketer executes alongside them. Platform and FDM, co-equal.
Berlin owns strategy, execution, and tools as a single offering. No other platform covers all three — and no agency owns the tool layer.
Not a tool to wield alone, not an agency to hand off to. The FDM executes on the platform with the team and feeds patterns back into Berlin's defaults — switching costs accumulate.
AI-search visibility is a core outcome alongside traditional SEO. Customers don't need a separate AEO tool or vendor.
Go-based agentic runtime + Snake.blue crawler + queryable keyword/page store. The reason one FDM carries an agency's caseload at agency-fraction cost.
A platform the team operates + an assigned Forward Deployed Marketer who executes on it with them. Co-equal halves, one motion.
An in-house marketer, a marketing team, or a founder who genuinely understands SEO — wants a platform to operate on and an expert to execute it with them. Not a tool to wield alone, not an agency to hand off to.
Active discovery: SaaS, eCommerce, Lead Gen × Founder/CMO. Live signal: Csuite.so (SaaS founder).
Enterprise: miniOrange in technical/compliance DD.
Demand precedes supply. One of the two committed customers used v1 through its rough UX and chose to continue on v2 — the underlying value lands before the product is polished.
Clinic, Bangalore. Used v1, returned to pay on v2 at launch. Direct proof that the value lands and that customers stay through a relaunch.
SaaS company. Committed at launch. Early signal in the SaaS × Founder discovery cell — second buyer pool converting at the same ARPU.
Enterprise identity & security. In technical/compliance DD on Berlin + FDM — third distinct buyer pool engaged.
The engineering substrate working in practice — the reason one FDM ships agency-scoped outcomes at agency-fraction cost.
An e-commerce operator running a 2.5 million page catalogue across 6 countries had 12,000 soft 404s — pages returning a 200 status but serving nothing. Redirects had to stay within each country's site.
Berlin's agents mapped the full link graph, classified each broken URL, and produced a country-aware redirect report in 15 hours. A traditional agency had previously scoped the same work at 6 months and 600+ engineering hours.
Delivered as a pilot underneath an agency running Berlin against their own client work — proof one FDM on this substrate ships agency-scoped outcomes in agency-fraction time. This is the engine under the ~1/4-of-agency price.
| Dimension | Trad. Agency | Berlin |
|---|---|---|
| Pages audited | 2,500,000 | 2,500,000 |
| Broken URLs classified | 12,000 | 12,000 |
| Scoped delivery time | 6 months | 15 hours |
| Engineering hours | 600+ | < 15 |
| Country-aware routing | Manual | Automated |
Snake.blue crawler · cached keyword/page store · proprietary data routing. The reason one Berlin FDM ships agency-scoped work in agency-fraction time — that's where the 1/4-of-agency pricing anchor comes from.
2025 → early 2030s at 30–50% CAGR. One of the fastest-growing segments in MarTech. Essentially didn't exist 2 years ago.
Profound $1B in 18 months (Sequoia, Kleiner, Lightspeed); AirOps $225M (Greylock); Peec AI tripled to $100M+ in 4 months.
Daydream's $15M Series A (April 2026) put real money behind AI-native SEO. Daydream sits at the agency edge of the spectrum; Berlin defines the middle — a Forward-Deployed Platform — and they aren't chasing the same logos.
| Daydream | Berlin | |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer | Enterprise / well-funded startups Product Hunt, Notion, Tome |
SEO-literate mid-market teams & founders Reach Psych, Csuite.so |
| Price entry | Agency price points | ~1/4 of agency cost · $499 entry, walks up with scope |
| Capital raised | $21M ($15M Series A · WndrCo · Apr 2026) | $1M seed in flight at $10M post · clean cap table |
| Substrate | Proprietary SEO agents · depth not publicly disclosed | Custom agentic framework on Go runtime, Snake.blue crawler, cached keyword/page store, 80+ ranking signals |
| Founder edge | Programmatic SEO operators Prior co. Flixed → 400K+ monthly visitors |
AI-infra engineer (RedisAI, Lightning.ai) AND ran a marketing agency to $500K |
Daydream's price point and brand point at enterprise. Berlin's first paid cohort is a Bangalore clinic and a bootstrapped SaaS founder at $499/mo — a buyer Daydream's economics can't reach.
Daydream's founders came up as programmatic SEO operators. Berlin's founder built production AI runtimes and scaled a marketing agency to $500K — a combination almost nobody else in this category has.
Subscription with usage-based credits. ~80% gross margin on platform infrastructure; LLM compute pass-through at cost. Sold as a managed service, not a tool seat.
Single-brand SMB scope. Where Reach Psych and Csuite.so came in at launch.
Local SEO retainer ($1.5K–$2K/mo).
Bootstrapped SaaS & B2B with serious SEO scope. The band ARPU walks toward.
Agency retainer ($4K–$8K/mo) at ~1/4 the cost.
Mid-market, full-funnel scope, multiple geos. Deeper FDM cadence.
Agency retainer ($10K–$15K/mo).
Multi-brand / large catalogue / compliance. Where miniOrange-class deals land. Senior FDM, dedicated capacity.
Enterprise engagements ($20K+/mo) plus tooling.
Customers enter at the band that matches their current scope and walk up as Berlin's surface area inside their business expands — more brands, more geos, more channels, deeper FDM cadence. No seat negotiations, no upsell motions — scope drives ARPU.
Most "agentic SEO" content comes from SEOs who picked up AI tooling. Berlin's founder is an agentic AI infrastructure expert who turned to SEO — a fundamentally different and more credible angle.
| FDM capacity | M2–3 onward |
| Sales & growth (FDM-assisted) | M2–3 |
| Full-stack developer | M3–4 |
All hires India-based — cost structure is highly competitive for senior talent.
Clean cap table, 100% founder-owned. Min check $25K. Pro-rata rights included. The round funds compounding growth — not just runway.
| M1 CURRENT |
M3 | M6 | M9 | M12 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customers | 2 | 10 | 21 | 39 | 64 |
| MRR | $1.0K | $2.2K | $6.7K | $17.9K | $35.8K |
| Monthly burn | $1.1K | $7.8K | $9.2K | $10.5K | $12.0K |
| Cash balance | $1.0M | $985K | $960K | $970K | $1.05M |
| Hiring (FDM, sales, dev) | $350K · 35% |
| GTM & distribution | $250K · 25% |
| Engineering & infra | $150K · 15% |
| Cloud & LLM | $100K · 10% |
| Operations & legal | $80K · 8% |
| Reserve / downside runway | $70K · 7% |
Cash-flow positive, repeatability across motions, expanding ARPU → Series A from a position of strength, not necessity.