Method
How Press Pool is built
Press Pool is a weekly record of AI companies that publicly announced a funding round. Every entry is taken from the public record and checked against its source, and each company is matched against the Machine Relations Index to show whether AI answer engines already cite its website.
Where the rounds come from
Candidate rounds come from a funding-announcement feed built on the reporting of TechCrunch, Tech.eu and EU-Startups, and from daily funding reports and company newsrooms. A candidate becomes an entry only after the amount, the round and the lead investors are confirmed at the company's own announcement or at the outlet that reported it, and both are linked on the entry. Amounts are written as announced, in the currency announced. Fund closes, standalone debt facilities and valuation-only news are not counted as startup rounds.
What counts as an AI company
A company is included when its own announcement describes the company, not one feature, as AI or as built for AI: models, AI infrastructure and compute, AI agents and the security and identity layers around them, or applications whose core work is done by AI. Companies that use AI as one feature among many are left out. The one-sentence description on each entry follows the company's own wording.
The AI citation column
The Machine Relations Index puts a fixed panel of buyer questions across 24 industry categories to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews on a recurring schedule and records the websites each answer cites. For each company, Press Pool counts the recorded answers that cited the company's own domain within the Index window named on the page. The panel does not ask about companies by name, so the column measures whether engines reach for a company when a buyer asks about its market, not whether an engine can describe the company when asked directly.
Corrections
Entries are corrected in place, and the page's updated date changes when they are. To report an error, see Contact.
Who publishes Press Pool
Press Pool is owned by Jaxon Parrott, founder and CEO of the earned-media agency AuthorityTech and the person who coined Machine Relations. Rounds are listed because they were publicly announced. No company pays to be listed, and AuthorityTech clients are treated like everyone else. More in About.