Raptive announced the launch of Raptive Intelligence, a new business unit designed to package creator content and consumer behavior data as enterprise infrastructure for brands, retailers, and AI platforms.

The company also appointed John Roa as Chief AI Officer and General Manager of the new unit and acquired AlchemyAI, an agentic food-intelligence platform that Roa founded. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Raptive Intelligence will offer licensed data access, real-time intelligence products, and agentic commerce infrastructure to consumer packaged goods companies, grocers, retailers, and AI platforms. The unit targets a use case that has grown more pressing as AI-generated answers increasingly shape product discovery: grounding AI responses in authoritative, trust-sensitive content to reduce error.

“No one needs trusted human expertise more than AI,” Roa said. “The quality of an agentic experience depends on the quality of the knowledge behind it.”

Food as the Initial Focus

Raptive Intelligence will launch with a focus on the food category, where Raptive says its audience represents nearly $1 trillion in grocery buying power. The company ranks first in Food, Family, and Lifestyle among digital media companies and reaches more than 224 million people each month across 6,500+ premium sites, according to the announcement.

AlchemyAI contributes a food knowledge graph that maps relationships across recipes, ingredients, products, preferences, techniques, substitutions, nutrition, and shopping intent. Raptive says this technology will support AI answer grounding, product recommendations, basket-building, and demand intelligence for commerce partners.

“Raptive’s core business has never been stronger, and that strength gives us permission to build boldly,” CEO Michael Sanchez said. “AI is how we connect those assets into something the market has never had access to before.”

Creator Monetization Backdrop

The announcement builds on a period of platform expansion for Raptive. Earlier this year, the company reported crossing $4 billion in total payouts to publisher partners since its founding. The company has also taken positions in the ongoing debate over AI and creator rights, among other issues, launching a “Terms of Content Use” framework in October 2024 that prohibits AI systems from scraping content within its network. More than 5,600 creators have adopted the framework.

Raptive states that its broader AI strategy centers on ensuring creators and publishers share in the value that AI systems derive from their work.

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