SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Jan. 05, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Unusual, the first and only company to help brands understand and change how AI talks about them, announced today its $3.6M round of funding from investors including BoxGroup, Long Journey Ventures, Y Combinator, Max Mullen (co-founder of Instacart), and Phosphor Capital. The company will be using the funds for hiring and to continue building out its AI optimization platform for brands.
Unusual was founded by Will Jack and Keller Maloney. Jack, a second time founder, has worked in AI research since 2014 and is an alum of MIT and SpaceX. Maloney has worked in AI applications since 2019 for companies such as Gatsby and 8VC.
Jack and Maloney built Unusual to help brands understand and change how AI models talk about their products and services. Their complete AI optimization platform helps businesses improve both their AI visibility (often referred to as answer/generative engine optimization, or AEO/GEO) as well as their AI Brand Alignment. AI Brand Alignment helps AI models talk about brands the same way that brands talk about themselves.
“ChatGPT is quickly becoming an ‘influencer’ for many people’s buying decisions, but it constantly misrepresents products and services,” said Will Jack, Co-Founder of Unusual. “Businesses today have no control over how ChatGPT positions their brand or what it says to their customers. Unusual helps brands have a say in how they are represented by AI.”
Unusual surveys AI models like a brand might survey its customers. It asks AI models hundreds of questions like, “in your mind, is [brand] a better solution for startups or enterprises?” Then, the software analyzes the outputs to discover patterns in how AI models form their opinions. Based on this analysis, Unusual creates and hosts content to reshape AI’s perception of the brand.
This methodology helped Unusual discover that AI models considered Reducto, one of Unusual’s customers, a “high quality,” but “niche software for startups.” This was an unhappy surprise to Reducto, who serves enterprises in the Fortune 10. “ChatGPT’s perception of us was hurting us without our knowledge,” shared Raunak Chowdhuri, Founder at Reducto, “Unusual is helping us highlight our enterprise-readiness, and we now have more control over how LLMs represent us.” Unusual found that AI models’ perception of Reducto’s “enterprise readiness” increased from a score of 18/100 to 54/100 during their three-month initiative. Read the full case study.
Unusual’s competitors treat AI models like a new search engine. They have coined terms like AEO and GEO that allude to SEO (search engine optimization). In contrast, Unusual treats AI models like human influencers. “People use ChatGPT for more than just search,” said Jack, “the entire buyer journey–search, discovery, research, evaluation, and selection–is compressed into a single conversation with an AI chatbot. This presents a new, unique challenge for brands, and they need a more holistic solution than just AEO/GEO.”
“Will and Keller are taking on the next big challenge facing brands: delivering their message to customers who are increasingly relying on ChatGPT for their buying decisions,” said Kulveer Taggar of Phosphor Capital. “Unusual is taking a first-principles approach to the problem by treating models like key opinion leaders, and is growing rapidly as brands see AI models influencing their customers. We’re excited to help them build out their team and bring this solution to more businesses.”
About Unusual
Unusual is the first and only company to help brands change how AI talks about them. Its tool runs massive surveys on AI models and uses the results to understand how AI models perceive a brand. Based on this, Unusual creates and hosts content that shapes AI’s perception that aligns with the brand’s goals. Unusual is working with brands including Monarch, Reducto, Axia PR, Popl & dozens more. The company is funded by BoxGroup, Long Journey Ventures, Y Combinator, Instacart Co-Founder Max Mullen, and Phosphor Capital. Learn more at https://unusual.ai.
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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f72abaf1-7f0b-49fb-ba7a-5772ff0ecdc0