IG Group Alumni Raise $1.2 Million for AI Search Startup

Obsero, a London startup founded by two former IG Group marketing executives, has raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by SFC Capital. The investment lands 13 months after the company was set up in September 2025. Angel investors and several Obsero customers also backed the round, although the company declined to identify which clients participated.

From IG Group to AI search

The founders' track record helps explain why Obsero is drawing interest from brokers and other consumer-facing financial firms. Michael Logue spent more than 13 years across two spells at IG and IG Group, most recently as Product and Marketing Director for its international business, and in between served as VP of Growth at tastytrade. Andy Francos brings two decades of organic-search experience from roles at IG, P&G and Cazoo; he said Cazoo attributed £252 million in revenue to organic search during his tenure there.

Obsero's platform models customer questions and gathers the answers returned by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. It then assesses whether a brand appears at all, how prominently it is featured, the tone of the response and which publishers or websites are cited as sources. The founders say the company analysed more than 10 million AI responses during its first year of operation.

The fresh capital will fund specialised AI agents designed to turn knowledge gained through Obsero's consulting work into tools that marketing teams can use directly. The startup also intends to more than double its engineering headcount and broaden its commercial operations.

Named clients include Zopa, Pepperstone and Zoopla, while Obsero says it also works with other brokers and fintech startups whose identities remain undisclosed. A J.D. Power study cited in the coverage found that 51% of surveyed consumers had used AI for financial information or advice, with investing and stock-market topics among the most common subjects. That gives brokers a reason to monitor their visibility when users compare platforms or research products.

Even so, the figures do not yet prove that AI-generated answers have become a major acquisition channel for brokers. Obsero's next test will be whether financial companies start treating visibility inside those answers as an ongoing marketing expense rather than an experiment.