David Maruyama founded CiteHQ.io after 25 years of building things that did not exist yet. He spent years inside the infrastructure that built the modern internet itself — at Lucent Technologies, during the exact years telecom carriers rebuilt their networks around Internet Protocol, and through the correction that followed when the dot-com bubble collapsed. Then came two decades of ventures spanning telecom, mobile money, and retail distribution throughout the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean: a first-of-its-kind mobile network in Costa Rica, built against a decades-old state monopoly. A banking platform turned into a channel for cross-border money transfers before most of the industry had connected the two ideas. A mobile carrier and a retail network built specifically for the US Hispanic market, at a time the national players treated it as an afterthought. Different chapters, different countries, different partners — the same instinct every time: find the real opportunity before the market agrees it exists, then execute with the discipline to prove it.
The Same Instinct, Applied to a New Wave
It started about fourteen months ago, with OmniStem — a licensed regenerative medicine and cellular therapy center in the Dominican Republic offering physician-supervised stem cell and biologic treatments. Building OmniStem's digital strategy for the AI-search era was David's first hands-on proof that the same instinct behind every venture on this record applied just as directly to a completely different kind of zero: the moment a category of businesses discovers that the way their customers find them has quietly changed. Those fourteen months were spent learning, in direct practice, how AI systems actually interact with information, process it, and elaborate an answer from it — work that became CiteRE, the proprietary model at the foundation of the frameworks and methodology CiteHQ runs on today.
That change is broader than any one clinic. A hospital procurement director does not Google "medical device supplier" anymore — she asks ChatGPT. A VC scouting cleantech deals does not scroll search results — he asks Perplexity. A distributor in Guadalajara looking for a Houston logistics partner does not type keywords into an English-language search bar — she asks an AI system, in Spanish, and acts on whatever answer it gives her. Traditional search optimized for a place in a list. This new discipline — Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization, GEO and AEO — optimizes for something harder: being the answer itself. Not ranked. Cited.
CiteHQ.io is Houston's first agency built entirely around that discipline. Every engagement starts with a measured citation-share baseline across six AI platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Claude — and ends with a documented, scored improvement. Not a promise. A number, the same way every venture on David's record has always been measured. And every strategy is built in English and in genuine, native Spanish, because Houston sits at the center of $800 billion in Latin American trade and 500,000-plus Spanish-speaking businesses, and no other agency in this category treats bilingual as anything more than an afterthought.
Why "CiteHQ"
The name is the whole thesis in one word. Not ranked — cited. Named, trusted, and repeated by the AI systems that are quietly becoming the front door to every purchase decision, every investment conversation, every partnership search. CiteHQ exists to make sure Houston companies are the ones AI systems name when it matters — in English, in Spanish, and measured the same rigorous way every venture on this record has always been measured: not by how the story sounds, but by the number at the end of the quarter.
Read the fuller story — including the larger vision behind the work, and why this wave earned David's deepest commitment — in "The Bigger Picture Behind CiteHQ.io." For the sourced, detailed track record, see "Building Things That Didn't Exist Yet" (the venture-building chapter) and "I Was Inside the Machine the Last Time This Happened" (the Lucent and internet-infrastructure chapter). Have a specific question instead? See our FAQ →
David Maruyama is Founder & CEO of CiteHQ.io, Houston's first English/Spanish AEO/GEO digital marketing agency. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, spent five years in banking prior to Columbia (Bank of Tokyo, Miami; Merrill Lynch), and spent 1999–2005 at Lucent Technologies during the IP infrastructure revolution. He founded Hexagram Advisors in 2007 and has structured, built, and led technology and telecommunications ventures across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, including as General Manager of Tuyo Móvil (2010–2013), Costa Rica's first private mobile telephony competitor to the state monopoly ICE.