The self-taught search operator who turned a college hustle into daydream, an AI-native agency betting that great SEO can be part machine, part craftsperson.
via @thenuka_k
Long before he was pitching venture capitalists on the future of organic search, Thenuka Karunaratne was solving a small, specific problem: how to let Canadians watch American Netflix. The site he built for it, netflixdnscodes.com, was one of a handful of affiliate projects he ran in high school. It also, in the plainest possible terms, helped pay for his college education.
That early tinkering set a pattern that has held for more than a decade. Karunaratne learns a corner of the internet well enough to make it pay, then keeps going. In college he built Flixed, a lead-generation business in the streaming industry. Using programmatic SEO - the practice of generating large volumes of structured, search-optimized pages from data - he sent more than 100,000 subscribers to services like HBO, Disney, and Hulu. It was bootstrapped, profitable, and, crucially, a live experiment in how far search could scale when you treated content like a system rather than a series of one-off articles.
Between ventures he worked inside other people's companies, serving as Chief of Staff to the COO at Pango and as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Hustle Fund. Those stints gave him a view of how growth-stage businesses actually operate, and where their marketing tends to break. The recurring gap he kept noticing: organic search was either done cheaply and badly, or expensively and slowly. Very few companies got both quality and pace.
In September 2023, Karunaratne teamed up with Shravan Rajinikanth, who became daydream's CTO, to build the company he had effectively been prototyping for years. The premise: pair AI-powered SEO agents with dedicated human experts, and encode the methods of the top 1% of practitioners into software. The agents handle the mechanical, repeatable work - keyword research, competitive analysis, audits, content generation. The humans handle the parts machines cannot fake: differentiation, proprietary data, expert opinion, and judgment.
The distinction matters to him, and he is unusually blunt about the hype in his own market. The pitch of fully automated, hands-off SEO is, in his words, good marketing that doesn't survive contact with reality. If AI makes content cheap for everyone, then generic content becomes worthless faster, not slower. Standing out requires data nobody else has and a point of view no model can invent.
daydream's argument is easier to make with a case study than a manifesto. For the zero-trust cybersecurity company Twingate, the team produced roughly a thousand programmatically generated articles about data breaches and vulnerabilities, mapped to the search patterns of real security buyers. The result: around 50,000 monthly visits, with roughly a fifth of demo-page traffic tracing back to that content. It is programmatic SEO of the kind Karunaratne has practiced since Flixed, now supercharged and supervised.
He is also candid that the skill set behind good SEO is shifting. As more of the work becomes structured and data-driven, the people who do it well will, over time, look more like engineers than copywriters. That belief is baked into how daydream hires and how it builds. The company frames its own culture around values like craftsmanship, ownership, and what it calls resilient optimism - a phrase that fits a founder who has spent years betting on a discipline many marketers still treat as a dark art.
On April 2, 2026, daydream announced a $15 million Series A led by WndrCo, with existing backers First Round Capital and Basis Set Ventures returning. The round brought total funding to roughly $21 million and is earmarked for hiring, product, and go-to-market expansion. The company's cap table also includes operators and angels who know the category cold, among them Lenny Rachitsky, Kareem Amin, and Eli Schwartz.
WndrCo's ChenLi Wang framed the bet in competitive terms: the teams that figure out organic search in the age of AI, he argued, will have an unfair advantage, and daydream is the company helping them get it. Co-founder Rajinikanth put the technical ambition plainly - agents that can think, strategize, and execute everything a senior SEO practitioner can.
What ties it all together is consistency of conviction. The teenager reverse-engineering Netflix region locks, the college student scaling Flixed, and the CEO raising a Series A are recognizably the same person: someone who reads search behavior like a map, distrusts easy automation, and keeps building the tool he wishes had existed. The market has changed around him - Google is no longer the only front door, and AI answer engines are rewriting the rules - but the instinct hasn't. Find the pattern. Build the system. Keep a human in the loop.
daydream is still a small team, roughly two dozen people at the time of its Series A. For Karunaratne, that is the point. He is not trying to replace SEO experts with software. He is trying to give every company access to one, and to prove that craftsmanship and speed were never actually a trade-off.
A snapshot of the milestones that scaled fastest. Bars are relative and illustrative.
He is the CEO and co-founder of daydream, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native agency for organic search. He previously bootstrapped the streaming-search business Flixed.
daydream pairs AI-powered SEO agents with dedicated human growth experts to help growth-stage companies execute organic search and content at scale.
daydream raised a $15M Series A in April 2026 led by WndrCo, with First Round Capital and Basis Set Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
He built affiliate websites in high school, bootstrapped Flixed in college using programmatic SEO, and worked at Pango and Hustle Fund.
He argues that "SEO on autopilot" is mostly marketing, and that winning teams use AI to automate mechanical work while humans focus on differentiation, data, and judgment.