Batwise has been selected for the BIG 12 generation of Start-Up Chile, one of 59 startups chosen from 1,296 applications submitted from around the world. We join through Ignite, the track for companies with a proven MVP working toward product-market fit.
We want to use the announcement for something more useful than a press release, so this post covers two things: what the program actually involves, and why we think a company measuring AI visibility belongs in a cohort like this one.
What BIG 12 Is
Start-Up Chile is the public accelerator run by Corfo, Chile's economic development agency under the Ministry of Economy. It launched in 2010 and has since backed more than 6,000 founders from 85 countries, which makes it one of the oldest and largest accelerator programs in the world.
BIG 12 is its twelfth generation. It runs three tracks, each matched to a different stage: Build for the earliest teams, Ignite for companies with a working MVP chasing product-market fit, and Growth for those already scaling. Batwise entered through Ignite.
Ignite runs for four months and comes with co-working space, structured mentorship, and access to the local innovation network. Foreign founders also receive a two-year Chilean work visa, which is how a program run by one country ends up with founders from eleven.
A Global Cohort, Not a Local One
The numbers behind this generation say something about who it was designed for.
| Metric | BIG 12 |
|---|---|
| Applications | 1,296 |
| Startups selected | 59 (roughly 4.5%) |
| Using AI or ML as core technology | Close to 60% |
| Chilean companies | 64% |
| Foreign companies | 35% |
| Countries represented among foreign teams | Peru (24%), Colombia and Argentina (19% each), Mexico (10%), plus Uruguay, Switzerland, Portugal, Poland, Italy and Russia |
| Leading sectors | Health and biotech (19%), agriculture and natural resources (17%), financial services and IT tools (12% each) |
| Marketing and media | 7% |
Two of those numbers stand out to us. Close to 60% of the cohort builds with AI. And marketing and media, where a tool like ours nominally sits, accounts for just 7% of the selection. We are a small slice of a cohort where AI is the default substrate. That is a reasonable description of the market we sell into, too.
Why AI Visibility Is a Global Problem, Built from Latin America
Language models do not have borders. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best running shoes for flat feet, or Perplexity for a reliable CRM for a 20-person team, the model is not consulting a country-partitioned index and returning local results. It synthesizes one answer. A Chilean brand and a Polish brand are competing for the same line of the same paragraph, whether or not they know the other exists.
That makes brand visibility inside AI answers a genuinely global problem. What is not global is the quality of the conditions for studying it, and this is where building from Latin America turns out to be an advantage rather than a constraint.
A mid-sized brand here typically sells in three or four countries, across two languages, through its own site and through several large retailers and marketplaces that outrank it on its own product names. Its digital presence is fragmented across properties it does not control. That is a harder measurement problem than a single-market DTC brand with one clean domain, and it is exactly the shape the problem takes when a brand of any size grows up. A system that can tell you how AI models talk about a brand under those conditions works anywhere. One built only for the clean case does not.
The cohort itself makes the same argument. Thirty-five percent of BIG 12 is foreign, spread across eleven countries. A program run out of Santiago that draws 1,296 applications from around the world is not building for one market, and neither are the companies in it.
What We're Building
Batwise measures and improves how AI models mention, cite and recommend brands. Traditional SEO asks whether you rank. We ask a different pair of questions: are you in the answer at all, and is the answer accurate about you?
That means monitoring across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, tracking not just whether a brand appears but in what context, against which competitors, and sourced from where, then turning that into work a marketing team can actually execute. The reasoning behind the approach is laid out in the Batwise framework.
What Comes Next
Acceleration starts in September and runs four months. Our plan for it is unglamorous and specific: deepen coverage of the models and markets our clients care about, sharpen the recommendations we hand over so they survive contact with a real marketing calendar, and keep publishing what we learn about how AI systems decide which brands to name.
Thanks to Corfo and the Start-Up Chile team for the selection, and congratulations to the other 58. The full cohort is listed here, and the original announcement is on LinkedIn.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Start-Up Chile's BIG 12 generation?
BIG 12 is the twelfth generation of Start-Up Chile, the public accelerator run by Corfo, Chile's economic development agency. It selected 59 startups from 1,296 applications, announced in July 2026. Close to 60% of the selected companies use AI or machine learning as their core technology, and 35% are foreign-founded, from eleven countries.
What is the Ignite track?
Ignite is one of the three tracks in a Start-Up Chile generation, alongside Build and Growth. It is aimed at startups with a demonstrated MVP working toward product-market fit, runs for four months, and provides co-working space, structured mentorship and access to the innovation network. Foreign founders also receive a two-year Chilean work visa.
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making a brand the source an AI model names or cites when it answers a question, rather than a blue link the user has to click. Where traditional SEO optimizes for position in a ranked list, AEO optimizes for presence and accuracy inside a generated answer.
What does Batwise do?
Batwise measures and improves how AI models mention, cite and recommend brands. It monitors brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, tracking whether a brand is mentioned, in what context, against which competitors and from which sources, then converts that into actions a marketing team can execute.
Sources: BIG 12 cohort figures as reported in July 2026 by Diario Financiero, trendTIC and EntNerd; program details from Start-Up Chile.