SearchBrand.ai joins Start-Up Chile: what the Growth 12 selection means

What Start-Up Chile is and what joining Growth means

Start-Up Chile is the public business accelerator run by Corfo, Chile's state economic development agency. Since 2010 it has supported thousands of startups from dozens of countries, with the goal of using Chile as a platform to scale into other markets.

The Big program is split into three stages based on startup maturity: Build for early validation, Ignite for teams with an MVP looking for commercial traction, and Growth for companies with proven traction that want to expand into new markets.

Growth is designed precisely for that last group: companies that already have customers, revenue and a validated model, and are ready to scale beyond their home market. Beyond the acceleration itself, Start-Up Chile connects selected startups with mentors, local innovation ecosystem players and investors, under an equity-free model: the state does not take an ownership stake in exchange for its support.

Big 12: 59 companies from 10 countries

The Big 12 generation of Start-Up Chile received over 1,296 applications and selected 59 companies from 10 countries, spread across the three programs. The full list covers everything from agricultural biotech and digital health to payments infrastructure and industrial AI.

Inside the Growth cohort, alongside SearchBrand.ai, companies like Comos (AI proptech for real estate brokers), Videsk (conversational intelligence for contact centers), HousePricing (AI real estate valuation), Oxygen (industrial platform for manufacturing) and Wasabil — the Chilean e-invoicing platform SearchBrand.ai already uses as a back-office integration — were also selected. Teams from Germany, Italy, Uruguay, Brazil and the United States joined too, confirming the global reach of the call.

In the Ignite program, one data point stands out for our category: another Chilean startup, Batwise, was selected with a proposal also focused on measuring how brands appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Two teams working on brand visibility inside AI landing in the same batch is not a coincidence. It's a signal that the AEO/GEO category is moving from niche bet to relevant infrastructure for any company with a digital footprint.

Why this selection matters beyond SearchBrand.ai

For a platform that was born around an idea still not widely installed in LATAM — that how AIs mention a brand is already a measurable, improvable channel — backing from an institution like Corfo plays a very specific role: it validates to customers, partners and investors that the problem is real and the market is taking it seriously.

Chile and LATAM overall are still behind the US and Europe in adopting AEO tools. That gap, which at first sounds like a disadvantage, is also the window of opportunity Start-Up Chile helps open: access to mentors, other startups in the ecosystem and public and private actors who are starting to ask the same question SearchBrand.ai answers — is their brand well represented when someone asks an AI.

What's next

Over the acceleration period, the SearchBrand.ai team will take part in the Growth program's mentorship and networking activities, focused on two fronts: adding more reference cases in industries like banking, retail and higher education, and continuing to sharpen the measurement methodology already used by clients in Chile, Peru and Colombia.

For the founding team, joining Growth confirms something that has been surfacing in conversations with customers and prospects: the question is no longer whether brands need to manage their AI visibility, but who does it first.

Sources

• Start-Up Chile — BIG 12: Get to know the new batch
• Corfo — Start-Up Chile program
• Portal Innova — Big 12 call opens