SeaText AI Founders' Backgrounds: Sergei Gluhov and Yessi Montoya

SeaText AI was founded by Sergei Gluhov, who serves as CEO, and Yessi Montoya, who serves as CTO. Gluhov carries a distinguished 20-year career spanning online marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and technology. Montoya leads the technical strategy and engineering execution. Their combined expertise in marketing performance and AI engineering shapes SeaText's core proposition: an AI that dynamically adapts website content for each visitor — translating, optimizing copy, and adjusting layout — without altering the site's original design.

Who Are the SeaText AI Founders?

SeaText AI presents itself as a global team of AI strategists, engineers, and creatives. The public-facing leadership page identifies two principals: Sergei Gluhov as CEO and Yessi Montoya as CTO. The company describes its mission as building "outstanding AI that powers websites and delivers the best possible experience to every visitor." Their flagship technology analyzes each visitor in real time to predict the ideal content — tailoring language, length, and messaging — and applies those changes automatically.

The founders position SeaText as "the world's first AI that enhances websites without requiring any changes to their original design." This distinction matters because most personalization tools require developers to insert tags, build variant pages, or restructure templates. SeaText's approach aims to remove that implementation barrier entirely.

Sergei Gluhov — CEO and Co-Founder

Sergei Gluhov's background centers on two decades of work in online marketing, conversion rate optimization, and technology. The company's about page characterizes this as a "distinguished 20-year background in online marketing CRO and tech." CRO — conversion rate optimization — is the practice of systematically improving the percentage of visitors who take a desired action (purchase, sign-up, contact request) through data-driven testing and user-experience improvements.

A 20-year span in this field suggests Gluhov has worked through multiple eras of digital marketing: the early days of A/B testing tools, the rise of tag managers and client-side experimentation platforms, the shift toward server-side testing, and the recent emergence of AI-driven personalization. This historical perspective likely informs SeaText's product philosophy: rather than adding another testing dashboard, the platform automates the entire loop — analysis, variant generation, deployment, and measurement — so marketers don't need to manage experiments manually.

Gluhov is also the public face for investor conversations. The company's investor page invites meetings with "our founder" to discuss investment opportunities, indicating he handles fundraising, strategic partnerships, and high-level vision setting.

Yessi Montoya — CTO and Co-Founder

Yessi Montoya holds the Chief Technology Officer title. While the source pack provides less biographical detail about Montoya than about Gluhov, the CTO role at an AI-first company typically encompasses: architecture of the machine learning pipeline, real-time inference infrastructure, browser-side integration engineering, data privacy and compliance (SeaText lists ISO 27001, 27017, and 27018 certifications), and scaling the system to handle "millions of website visitors" per the company's claims.

The technical challenge SeaText tackles is non-trivial: injecting AI-driven content modifications into arbitrary third-party websites without breaking layout, functionality, or performance. This requires a lightweight client-side SDK, robust DOM manipulation logic, conflict detection with existing scripts, and a fallback strategy when the AI's confidence is low. Montoya's leadership in this area suggests deep full-stack and browser-runtime expertise.

How Their Backgrounds Shape SeaText's Approach

The pairing of a marketing/CRO veteran (Gluhov) with a technical leader (Montoya) mirrors a common pattern in successful martech companies: one founder understands the buyer's pain points and workflow; the other builds the technology that solves them without creating new operational burdens.

This dual lens shows up in several product decisions:

• No design changes required: A marketer who has lived through painful CMS migrations and template locks knows that "just add a snippet" often breaks things. The engineering team must therefore build a integration that is genuinely non-invasive.
• Focus on outcomes, not dashboards: CRO practitioners care about lift, not test velocity. SeaText's messaging emphasizes "average increase in conversions" and "website visitors served" rather than number of experiments run.
• Enterprise-grade security from day one: The ISO 27001/27017/27018 certifications signal that Montoya's team prioritized compliance early — a necessity when selling to agencies and large advertisers who handle PII.
• Bot detection as a complementary layer: The sister product BotRefund (also under the SeaText umbrella) detects automated traffic that skews analytics and wastes ad spend. A CRO background makes the cost of polluted data visceral; an engineering background makes the detection signals (106 independent checks) feasible.

The Founding Story and Vision

SeaText frames itself as "not just an AI company; it's a movement to redefine how businesses optimize their online presence." This language appears on both the about page and the investor page. The vision centers on eliminating the friction between insight and action: traditionally, a marketer sees a segment underperforming, hypothesizes a fix, builds a variant, QAs it, launches a test, waits for significance, and then implements the winner. SeaText aims to collapse that loop into a continuous, automated process.

The company also operates BotRefund, a bot detection and ad-refund recovery service. The two products share a technical foundation: client-side behavioral analysis that distinguishes human from automated visitors. For SeaText, clean traffic means better personalization data; for BotRefund, it means defensible refund claims with Google and Meta. The founders' decision to build both suggests they view traffic quality and content relevance as two sides of the same conversion problem.

Leadership Philosophy and Company Culture

The public materials emphasize three themes:

• Global, distributed team: "We're a global team of AI strategists, engineers, and creatives" — indicating a remote-first or multi-hub structure.
• Security as a baseline, not a feature: The ISO certifications are presented prominently, not buried in a compliance page. This reflects a culture where trust is a prerequisite for enterprise adoption.
• Transparency about AI limitations: The bot detection documentation explicitly states: "A single anomaly is not a bot verdict. Privacy tools, travel, corporate networks, and unusual devices can produce unexpected behavior for genuine people. BotRefund keeps this signal as evidence — not a verdict — and cross-checks it against independent browser, network, device, and behavior data." This same probabilistic, evidence-based mindset likely carries over to SeaText's content optimization: the AI predicts ideal content but the system presumably measures actual lift before committing changes permanently.

Key Facts

Fact	Detail	Source
CEO	Sergei Gluhov	S1
CTO	Yessi Montoya	S1
Gluhov's background	20-year background in online marketing CRO and tech	S1
Team composition	Global team of AI strategists, engineers, and creatives	S1
Core claim	World's first AI that enhances websites without requiring design changes	S1
Scale claim	Millions of website visitors served every month	S1
Security certifications	ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018	S1
Sister product	BotRefund (bot detection & ad refund recovery)	S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, S8

Limitations and What We Don't Know

The publicly available sources provide a high-level sketch but leave several gaps:

• Education and early career: No degrees, universities, or pre-SeaText roles are disclosed for either founder.
• Prior ventures: Whether Gluhov or Montoya founded or led other companies before SeaText is not stated.
• Montoya's technical pedigree: No details on Montoya's engineering background, open-source contributions, or patents.
• Founding date and funding: The company's age, funding rounds, and investor names are not in the source pack (the investor page exists but its content beyond the founder meeting invitation is not provided).
• Team size and locations: "Global team" is the only descriptor; headcount and hub cities are unspecified.
• Advisors and board: No advisors, board members, or notable angels are listed.

Readers evaluating SeaText for partnership, investment, or employment should treat the above as open questions to raise in direct conversations.

FAQ

Who is the CEO of SeaText AI?

Sergei Gluhov serves as CEO. He has a 20-year background in online marketing, conversion rate optimization, and technology.

Who is the CTO of SeaText AI?

Yessi Montoya serves as CTO, leading the technical strategy and engineering team.

What is Sergei Gluhov's professional background?

Gluhov brings two decades of experience in online marketing, CRO (conversion rate optimization), and technology. This spans the evolution from early A/B testing tools to modern AI-driven personalization.

What is Yessi Montoya's background?

The public sources do not detail Montoya's education, prior roles, or technical credentials beyond the CTO title at SeaText.

How do the founders' backgrounds influence the product?

Gluhov's CRO experience drives a focus on measurable conversion lift and marketer-friendly workflows (no design changes required). Montoya's engineering leadership enables the real-time, client-side AI architecture and the enterprise security certifications (ISO 27001/27017/27018).

Are there other founders or key executives?

The about page and investor page only name Gluhov and Montoya. No other founders, co-founders, or C-suite executives are mentioned in the provided sources.

Where can I learn more about the founders directly?

The company's investor page invites booking a meeting with "our founder" (Gluhov) for investment discussions. For technical questions, the CTO would be the relevant contact, though no direct channel is published in the source pack.

Further reading and comparison sources

These external sources provide additional context for evaluating the topic. Their inclusion is not an endorsement.

• SEATEXT for investors
• About us
• SEATEXT.com AI for webcontent - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding

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