Digital Neighbor borrowed its manners from public television and its discipline from performance marketing. The result is a Tampa agency that sells clarity, counts leads, and is willing to admit when an experiment deserves the undo button.
The independent agency built its name buying digital ads. Its next act is harder: proving which dollars actually caused growth, and exposing the ones that did not.
Sherpa is a San Francisco startup building an AI agent that makes websites improve themselves. It installs with a single line of code, studies how visitors behave, generates on-brand variants of pages and flows, runs A/B tests on live traffic, and ships the winners - all without a designer, developer, or analyst in the loop. Founded in 2026 by ex-Lindy engineers Ethan Kinnan and Norbu Sonam and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26 batch), Sherpa also optimizes sites for AI agents, tuning agent-facing pages so that assistants recommend a company more often. Early customers report 15-35% lifts in their primary conversion metric within the first 30-60 days.
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AI-search optimization platform that helps brands see, measure, and improve how they appear inside generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Founded in 2025 by ex-Google Search and DeepMind PM Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, the Y Combinator-backed company treats GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as the successor to traditional SEO, analyzing millions of AI responses to tell companies whether AI models recommend them - and what to change if they don't.