Announcing Our Investment in Petra Labs

Building the Attribution Layer for AI Search

We're thrilled to announce that Work-Bench led Petra Labs' $5.2M Seed round, along with friends from Afore Capital, Pathlight, and strategic angels.

As ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI systems become the front door for how people find products and services, brands no longer show up in a ranked list they can optimize against. They either appear in the answer or they don't.

That shift has spawned an entire category of visibility tools that tell brands whether they're being mentioned by AI models. Enterprises are already running multiple versions of these tools at once and churning through them quickly, because knowing you were mentioned doesn't tell a CMO which of the dozen things their team did last month actually caused it, or whether any of it drove revenue.

There is a structural reason for why this is hard. For fifteen years, SEO ran on a bounded, enumerable set of inputs: backlinks, on-page content, keywords, technical site health, with measurable outputs and conversions from organic search. They behaved consistently enough to be solved by agencies and fragmented tooling.

The story changes with LLMs. When LLMs are predicting the next token based on statistical relationships learned across the public internet (e.g. YouTube, Reddit, PR, documentation, reviews, and community discourse), there's no single AEO algorithm and the permutations across models, prompts, and channels is orders of magnitude larger than anything SEO ever produced.

That's where Petra Labs comes in.

Petra is the first AEO partner to build custom last-mile attribution models for each client, connecting AI search activity to the business outcomes a client tracks and separating AI-influenced demand from everything else.

Why Now

ChatGPT crossed 1 billion global monthly active users in May 2026. It's the fastest app in history to hit that milestone, outpacing Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. A Bain survey found that 56% of Millennials and Gen Z say they mostly or always use chatbots or a mix of chatbot and search. Bain also found that AI overviews inside search itself now make 70% of searches "zero-click."

Both paths, chatbots and search, are converging on the same outcome for marketers: less of the traffic and ranking signal they used to measure themselves against. At the same moment discovery is fragmenting like this, the rest of the measurement stack is collapsing. Platforms are increasingly grading their own homework, restricting third-party access, and pulling analytics in-house, leaving marketers with no equivalent of a Google Search Console or a Meta Ads Manager for AI search.

The Product

From visibility dashboards to a closed attribution loop.

Petra Labs has built three capabilities to close that loop:

1. An attribution engine. A system of record for every intervention a marketing team takes to influence AI visibility, whether it be a PR placement, a YouTube video, a Reddit thread, a page update, and connects it to changes in AI recommendations, site traffic, and downstream revenue.
   
2. LLM simulation and visibility intelligence. Large-scale simulations across AI models using high-intent, purchase-driven prompts, capturing which vendors get recommended, which citations get used, and how retrieval actually behaves.
   
3. Enterprise classification and citation dynamics. A classification layer that maps brands, products, and features in LLM outputs at the right level of abstraction, while tracking which sources are gaining or losing influence over time.
   

No two companies measure outcomes the same way, which is exactly why this can't be solved with off-the-shelf software. A rise in site traffic signals a qualified buyer for one business and noise for another. Branded and organic demand carry different weight from one company to the next. And the metric that matters most, whether it's closed revenue or qualified pipeline, differs across every account. That's why Petra Labs builds a custom last-mile attribution model for each client rather than shipping a one-size-fits-all dashboard.

Petra Labs embeds directly into each customer's data and attribution environment through a forward-deployed model, translating a company's internal ontology (products, pages, segments, conversions, revenue) into Petra Labs' measurement model. An embedded team of operators, powered by the Petra Labs Agents Platform, identifies the prompts a brand needs to win, tracks visibility and sentiment across every major model, and executes across earned, owned, and social media on the client's behalf.

The Team

CEO Sami Akkawi spent his career in strategy consulting at Strategy&, where he ran thousands of interviews with senior marketing leaders at the world's largest brands and the same complaint kept surfacing: nobody had a credible way to connect marketing activity to what AI models were telling their customers. COO Ramie Khoury is an engineer-turned-sales-leader who led strategy and operations at Traba. CTO Rishi Penmetcha brings engineering experience from Palantir, Ironclad, and Traba.

Petra Labs got its start as a fully managed AEO service, with the team owning 100% of strategy, execution, and attribution for its earliest customers by hand before building the software to do it at scale. The product is opinionated the way it is because the founders spent their first few months running the process manually, against real budgets, before productizing their approaches.

The team is fully based out of New York, in the same city as many of the enterprise marketing organizations they sell to. That proximity is part of the operating model. They're showing up in person, sitting inside a customer's actual workflow, and bringing real outcomes.

If you're a CMO, growth leader, or performance marketing executive stitching together visibility tools, spreadsheets, and gut instinct to make sense of how AI search is reshaping your funnel, it's time to see what a real attribution layer looks like. Reach out to the Petra Labs team to see how they can help.

Welcome to the Work-Bench family, Petra Labs!