CV Ventures is relevant to the AI agent ecosystem because it builds the instrumentation and execution tools that allow businesses to interact with LLMs at scale. Highlighted.ai serves as a 'sensor' for the ecosystem, tracking how agents and models perceive specific brands, which is a critical data point for the emerging field of Answer Engine Optimization.
Additionally, SheetMagic functions as an actuator that allows for agentic batch processing within the familiar interface of a spreadsheet. By allowing users to automate complex prompting across large datasets, it bridges the gap between manual AI interaction and fully autonomous agents. The studio is an example of the 'thin-layer' approach to AI, focusing on the specific utility and monitoring tools that builders need to measure their impact within an AI-first search environment.
CV Ventures is a startup studio that operates at the tactical edge of the AI content boom. Founded and operated by Curran Van Waarde, the studio avoids the high-burn, moonshot-seeking trajectory of traditional venture-backed labs. Instead, it focuses on building a suite of high-utility tools for SEOs, marketers, and data analysts who need to integrate large language models (LLMs) into their existing workflows. The studio is small by design, functioning as a nimble vehicle to launch products like Wordplay and Highlighted.ai without the overhead of a massive corporate structure.
Wordplay was one of the early entries into the long-form AI writing space, focusing on programmatic SEO—the practice of generating large volumes of search-optimized pages to capture long-tail traffic. Unlike general-purpose chatbots, Wordplay is built for structure and volume. This theme of bulk automation continues with SheetMagic, a tool that embeds AI capabilities directly into Google Sheets. By allowing users to run prompts against thousands of rows of data simultaneously, CV Ventures addresses a specific need for batch processing that standard web-based chat interfaces cannot handle efficiently. This converts a static document into a high-throughput processing engine for tasks like sentiment analysis, data cleaning, or metadata generation at a scale that would be impossible to perform manually.
Perhaps the most forward-looking product in the portfolio is Highlighted.ai. As LLMs become a primary source of information for users, the mechanism of discovery is shifting from traditional search result pages to AI-generated summaries. Highlighted.ai functions as a monitoring service, tracking how often and in what context a brand or website is mentioned by various AI models. This is effectively a monitoring system for the LLM era, providing businesses with the data they need to understand their visibility within the training sets and real-time outputs of models like GPT-4 or Claude. This capability addresses the nascent field of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), where the goal is to ensure a brand is part of the conversational output of an AI agent.
The studio model allows CV Ventures to experiment with different facets of the AI stack without committing to a single vertical. While products like CallScaler and VisitorTracking represent more traditional SaaS offerings, the recent focus is clearly on the AI wrapper and monitoring categories. The strategy relies on identifying friction points in how professionals use AI—such as the difficulty of bulk prompting or the lack of visibility into LLM outputs—and building focused, paid tools to solve them. CV Ventures is not attempting to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on model architecture; it treats these models as a new layer of infrastructure. The studio’s value is in building the translation layer between raw model capability and the specific, repetitive tasks of digital marketing and brand management.
Track how often AI mentions your brand or website.
Long-form AI writer for programmatic SEO.
Run AI prompts directly inside Google Sheets.
CV Ventures is hiring.