Zeta Global, the New York marketing technology company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, signed a definitive agreement on October 5, 2026 to acquire Senso, a Toronto-based AI company backed by Y Combinator. Neither company disclosed the purchase price or other financial terms, and the announcement did not give a date for closing.
The deal brings in-house a piece of technology Zeta was already relying on. Senso's software powers Zeta's generative engine optimization (GEO) product, which tracks and tries to improve how brands appear in answers from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews.
Senso co-founder and CEO Saroop Bharwani and the rest of the Senso team will join Zeta. Zeta said it will work with the team to keep service running for Senso's existing customers. LUMA Partners advised Senso on the sale.
What Senso built
Bharwani founded Senso in 2017 with Thomas Nelson, who serves as CTO. The company's first product was an AI platform for financial institutions that analysed first- and third-party data to predict what customers would need next, so banks and credit unions could reach out before a borrower left. In 2020 Bharwani told Crunchbase News that Senso's coverage reached more than 20% of Canada's mortgage market.
The company later moved toward knowledge management and then search. After graduating from Y Combinator in 2024, it built an AI-powered knowledge base for credit unions. In 2025 it released a GEO tool designed to help credit unions show up more prominently in AI-driven search and to monitor what those systems say about them.
Senso also offers what it calls a verified context layer: customers load source material such as product catalogues, compliance documents and knowledge bases, and Senso publishes verified versions for AI models to cite. Commentary from BERI noted that Y Combinator's listing shows a team of eight.
“Senso was founded on the simple principle of making AI more useful in the real world, not more conversational.”
Why Zeta is buying
Zeta sells data-driven marketing software to large enterprises and has framed the deal as a way to connect AI visibility to its own customer data. The company said that, combined with the Zeta Data Cloud, Senso's technology would help identify who AI-generated answers reach and link that to marketing and business results.
In the announcement, Zeta co-founder, chairman and CEO David A. Steinberg argued that the models themselves are becoming commonplace and that the advantage lies in the infrastructure connecting an enterprise's data to them. Bharwani said Senso was set up to make AI useful in practical settings rather than merely more conversational, and told BetaKit that the combination would let businesses see who AI is reaching and measure the outcomes.
Zeta also gains AI engineering staff. The company described Senso as an AI engineering firm and said the deal would strengthen its connections to frontier AI models. Bharwani was scheduled to speak at Zeta's customer conference, Zeta Live, on October 8.
The founders and the funding
Senso went through Techstars before raising seed money. BetaKit reported a C$1.5 million (about $1.1 million) seed round in October 2018, led by Breakaway Growth with NEXT Canada and Techstars taking part.
In July 2020 the company announced a C$4 million (about $3 million) round that closed that April. Mendoza Ventures and Breakaway Growth led it, with Luge Capital, Rising Tide, Inovia Capital and BDC participating. BetaKit described it as a seed extension ahead of a planned Series A; Crunchbase News called it a pre-Series A and put Senso's total funding at about $4 million. At the time the company had 25 staff and planned to expand in the United States.
No later priced round was publicly reported before the company joined Y Combinator in 2024. In a 2022 LinkedIn post cited by BetaKit, Bharwani said he had not been sure the company would survive.
A crowded market for AI search visibility
Brands are paying more attention to how they appear in chatbot answers as consumers shift some searching to AI tools. BetaKit cited a study by the agency Eight Oh Two finding that 37% of consumers began a web search with an AI tool instead of a traditional search engine, and 47% had used AI to help make a purchase decision.
Competition for that budget is growing. BERI noted that Profound, another GEO company, raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation in September 2026. Zeta, which reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $443 million, is choosing to own the technology rather than license it, and Senso's customers, many of them credit unions, now become Zeta customers.
