BrandCapsule Goes Live — and the Revenue Is Already Coming In
BrandCapsule, Toby Corey's AI Discovery Intelligence platform, has launched with paying B2B and B2C customers. It runs brands' buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini weekly, revealing where they're recommended or invisible—and what to change to win.
Six months after Santa Cruz Works first introduced BrandCapsule, the AI discovery company has launched, signed paying customers across both B2B and B2C, and is proving out a thesis that’s only gotten more urgent: AI doesn’t just help buyers find brands anymore — it decides which ones they see.
When we first wrote about BrandCapsule in December, founder Toby Corey was tackling a quiet problem: AI systems don’t actually know who brands are. The fix back then was an identity layer. Since then, the company has gone considerably further — and shipped.
Today BrandCapsule is live as an AI Discovery Intelligence platform, with paying customers spanning enterprise B2B and consumer B2C, from a clean-energy deep-tech company to local Santa Cruz businesses. The platform runs a brand’s real buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini every week, reads how each model answers, and tells the brand exactly where it’s being recommended, where it’s invisible, and what to change to win the answer.
“The job changed from reaching the buyer to tuning your brand so AI recommends it,” says Corey. “That’s not a slogan — it’s a different discipline. The old funnel was about getting in front of people. Now an AI gets in front of them for you, and increasingly decides who makes the shortlist before the buyer even knows they’re shopping.”
The numbers behind that shift are stark, and they’re why BrandCapsule is landing customers fast. 94% of B2B buyers now use AI in their purchase process, and twice as many name generative AI as their single most meaningful research source — outranking vendor websites, product experts, and sales teams. More than half compare vendors inside AI, and build the business case there, before they ever contact a company.
“People hear ‘AI discovery’ and think it’s a visibility tool — am I showing up, yes or no,” Corey says. “It’s bigger than that. The decision is being made inside the AI now. By the time a buyer reaches out, four of five vendors on their shortlist were already set on day one — and 95% of the time the winner came from that day-one list. If you’re not in the answer, you’re not in the running, and you’ll never see the deal you lost.”
It isn’t only a B2B story. Consumer use of generative AI for shopping jumped from 38% to 51% in a single year, and among shoppers already using it, 72% now treat AI as their primary tool for researching products and brands — which is why BrandCapsule’s earliest customers range from technical enterprises to consumer-facing local businesses.
“Whether the buyer is a CISO evaluating infrastructure or someone looking for sustainable packaging, the first cut now happens inside the answer,” Corey says. “That’s what makes this universal. Every brand, B2B or B2C, is being described by an AI to its buyers right now — and most of them have no idea what it’s saying.”
What sets the platform apart, Corey is quick to note, is the discipline beneath it: this isn’t monitoring. “Plenty of tools will tell you the score. We tell you what to tune to win — which question you’re losing, which competitor took it, and what to change. The diagnosis and the move, in one motion. That’s the whole game.”
That clarity — and the willingness to build it in Santa Cruz rather than chase the loudest room — is vintage Corey, whose arc runs from co-founding USWeb through SolarCity and Tesla to lecturing at Stanford. BrandCapsule is the latest chapter, and by the early evidence, one of the timeliest.
Brands curious where they stand can request a free AI Discovery Snapshot at brandcapsule.ai (http://brandcapsule.ai/).
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