Kevin Chandra

Kevin Chandra
Occupation	Entrepreneur, software executive
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of The Prompting Company

Kevin Chandra is an Indonesian entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of The Prompting Company, a business-to-business software startup based in South San Francisco, California, that helps products gain visibility and recommendations within generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and DeepSeek. The company is a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2025 batch.

Background

Kevin Chandra is of Indonesian origin. He has spoken publicly about his path from Indonesia to Silicon Valley, appearing as a guest on Endgame, an interview program hosted by former Indonesian trade minister Gita Wirjawan, in an episode titled "Indonesians Cracking the Code of Silicon Valley," in which he discussed his experiences navigating the technology industry as an Indonesian founder. The episode offered a rare window into the challenges faced by Southeast Asian entrepreneurs seeking to establish themselves in the competitive San Francisco Bay Area startup ecosystem.

Career

Kevin Chandra co-founded The Prompting Company to address a fundamental shift in how consumers discover products and services. As AI-powered search tools increasingly replace traditional search engines for product recommendations, the company developed a platform focused on generative engine optimization (GEO) — a discipline aimed at ensuring that brands and products are cited or recommended in AI-generated responses. GEO is distinct from traditional search engine optimization (SEO) in that it targets the training data, retrieval pipelines, and citation behaviors of large language models rather than the ranking algorithms of conventional web search engines. As Chandra described it, the core problem for businesses is that their next customer may not discover them through a Google search but through a query posed to an AI assistant — and if the AI does not surface a given brand, that brand is effectively invisible to that customer.

The Prompting Company operates as a SaaS platform in the marketing technology space. Its core value proposition rests on the observation that consumers increasingly receive product recommendations from AI systems rather than from traditional web search, and that businesses require dedicated tools to ensure they appear in those AI-generated answers. The company sits within a broader emerging category sometimes referred to as answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization, a market that has attracted growing attention from marketers and technology investors as AI assistants become more embedded in everyday consumer behavior.

Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator program known for backing companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe, accepted The Prompting Company into its Summer 2025 batch. Y Combinator's backing typically provides early-stage startups with seed funding, mentorship, and access to a dense network of alumni investors and founders, and acceptance is widely regarded as a significant endorsement of a company's potential within the technology industry.

In October 2025, The Prompting Company raised a $6.5 million seed round, as reported by TechCrunch and other outlets. The funding round accompanied an announcement that the company was partnering with NVIDIA on what was described as "next-generation" search capabilities, though specific technical details of the partnership had not been publicly disclosed at the time of reporting. At the time of the seed round, the company employed approximately three people, reflecting its early-stage status as of late 2025.