Founders: Rushana Maksudova, David Andersen
If you've ever worked at Google, you may be familiar with Crucial Conversations. It's a multi-day course on how to tackle high-stakes conversations. This has become a staple exercise for new Googlers on orientation day. Unknowingly, this exercise allowed Rushana Maksudova and David Andersen to become friends, then partners in life and now co-founders in business.
The journey to co-founding a startup solving the AI search problem for businesses didn't come instantly. Before AI became popularised like it is today, there were people working on cutting-edge AI projects in the late 2010s. David was one of those few people, accruing over ten years of building AI and machine learning systems before ChatGPT became the number one app on your phone. Rushana spent six years at Google building and designing programs for developers administered across ten global offices amongst many other projects. Coding was eventually swapped for adventure. Rushana is someone who pushes herself to the maximum, from working in a cheetah conservation centre to being able to fly three different aircraft types. It's taught her resilience and how to perform in high-pressure scenarios. She sailed to Antarctica on a nine-person Australian race boat crew instead of choosing the safer cruise ships. That’s just who she is. If you asked the team what their biggest adventure has been, it wouldn’t be any of the things listed above. Both would say that building businesses has been the most incredible push to personal growth. Most people seek adventure away from work but this team wouldn't trade the adventure of building BrandViz for anything else.
Rushana and David started their first business, an AI software consultancy, working with partners in energy and predictive maintenance. Building a venture-scalable business was always in the rear-view mirror but no problems really called out to them. At some point, however, everyone stopped searching on Google and started asking ChatGPT or Claude for everyday search requests. Simple searches asking for product recommendations, travel itineraries and the odd random question were all being funnelled into AI search. Using their Google-coded brains, Rushana and David figured executives would want to know how AI positions their brand to potential buyers. That insight became the foundation for BrandViz. In business, distribution is always the hardest aspect to get right. For BrandViz, the technology they were building allowed them to attract inbound customers more easily. They optimised their own site for AI visibility and landed one of their first customers that way. Early on, focus was placed on validating extensively by talking to a range of businesses and spending six months servicing a range of clients. That brought them enough data to launch a self-serve product that helped spike brand visibility immensely in AI search. Today it allows clients to work with a product that caters to the most urgent requests first. For a lot of people, this saves hours of manual work. 90% of B2B buyers are already using AI to research. BrandViz helps brands shoot up to #1 ranked in AI search, increasing AI visibility by up to 30x and category search by almost 50%.
