Peec, one of Berlin’s rising startups, has doubled its annual revenue within months to $10 million, sources say.

One rising startup in Berlin, Peec AI, has surpassed $10 million in annual revenue, according to internal dashboard data seen and verified by TechCrunch.

Peec AI raised a $21 million Series A six months ago. While CEO Marius Meiners did not disclose its valuation to me at the time (he only revealed that it was above $100 million), he did say that the startup had grown its revenue to more than $4 million in the 10 months since its launch.

So, it has doubled its revenue trajectory, and at a faster pace.

Peec helps brands track and improve their visibility in AI searches. While in Berlin, she recently opened an office in New York.

It also serves as evidence of one of the major market shifts occurring in Europe’s technology landscape.

“Founders these days track revenue very closely,” Antler partner Christoph Klink told me just two days ago. Sitting at a hotel lobby bar during an eventful week for the tech ecosystem, the Berlin-based VC offhandedly mentioned Peec AI as one of the most successful companies in his portfolio, alongside Lovable and others.

My next question was how to define success, which led to a discussion of recent market cycles. He said that compared to six years ago, the big change is that success is now defined by growth, not valuation.

Having learned lessons from the froth of 2021 and the subsequent painful return to reality, investors now realize that revenue cannot be an afterthought. The corollary is that it’s not something you can check every two weeks, Klink told me.

Startups now tend to keep running dashboards on revenue progress, sometimes – as at Peec – visible to all employees.

For some founders, this requires some adjustment; But others were born just for this new cycle.

Peec AI’s product takes the same approach as SEO dashboards, except that it helps brands track Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — visualizing whether it shows up when users type a certain set of prompts into ChatGPT and the like.

But as Mainers told me afterward, he’s also a former esports athlete and was once ranked among the top 100 League of Legends players. That’s why he shared the revenue tracker with his entire company: his background gave him a unique insight into what makes a team a winner.

Talent is number one, and Peec AI has taken an innovative approach to recruiting in the competitive Berlin market.

Like many startups in the Gulf region, but very few in Europe, it invested in billboards to showcase itself not only to potential customers, but also to applicants. In our conversation, Klink recalled with a smile that these billboards were often strategically placed in front of other tech companies around town.

What those billboards say may vary, but they’re part of a story that tries to position Peec AI as a company worth jumping into. According to Klink, this signal is especially important in the current AI cycle, as companies and investors rely on trends that are just beginning to emerge — such as AI research.

This bet on undercurrents applies to many of the startups Klink has invested in, which is why he understands why portfolio companies like Peec AI — and Lovable — not only track ARR closely, but also sometimes publicly disclose revenue milestones despite never having any commitment to do so.

“This is a way to show that it works,” Klink said. “It also shows the focus on growth that defines the culture.”