A Santa Cruz Startup Tackling One of AI’s Biggest Blind Spots
Santa Cruz has always been a place where ideas get tested early and honestly. That spirit is showing up again with the launch of BrandCapsule, a new AI infrastructure company founded by longtime local entrepreneur and Stanford lecturer, Toby Corey.
As AI chat becomes the primary way people discover products and services, a quiet problem has emerged: AI systems don’t actually know who brands are. When people ask open-ended questions like “best solar installers near me” or “sustainable packaging options,” models infer answers from fragmented, outdated, or noisy web data. There is no canonical, verified way for a legitimate business to be recognized inside those answers.
BrandCapsule exists to solve that gap.
The company provides a domain-verified brand identity object — a machine-readable source of truth served directly from a company’s own website — so AI systems can ground their reasoning on facts instead of inference. It’s not SEO, prompt engineering, or content generation. It’s a foundational identity layer for the AI web.
After quietly building following the Tuul Technologies IP acquisition, BrandCapsule has now shipped its first working beta, including live domain verification, a public registry, crawler telemetry, and an open protocol designed to scale through platforms and ecosystems.
Santa Cruz Works members will be among the first organizations invited into the beta, with early access to explore how AI currently interprets their brand — and why verified identity will matter as AI-driven discovery accelerates.
BrandCapsule is based in Santa Cruz and built by a team with deep experience in applied AI, enterprise platforms, and scaling early infrastructure. It’s a reminder that meaningful technology doesn’t always come from the loudest rooms — sometimes it comes from places that value clarity, integrity, and building things the right way.
Early access requests are now open at brandcapsule.io
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