- Profound has raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation.
- Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, seven months after its $96M Series C.
- It now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100.
Buyers don’t type search queries much anymore. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity what to buy, and increasingly, they act on whatever answer comes back.
Profound, the startup trying to make sure brands don’t disappear inside that answer, has raised $180 million in a Series D round that values it at $1.8 billion, nearly double what it was worth seven months ago.
Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons all returned.
It brings Profound’s total funding to more than $335 million since 2024, and follows a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed in February.
From tracking brand mentions to doing the work
Profound was founded in 2024 by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, who met at startup incubator South Park Commons. Cadwallader had previously built Kyra, an influencer-marketing agency that worked with Fortune 500 brands; Babbs was a design engineer at Uber.
The New York company is now also opening an applied-AI research operation in San Francisco with the new capital, to study how well frontier models handle marketing work.
The product started as an analytics dashboard: it tracks how often ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention a brand, in what context, and against which competitors, drawing on more than two billion real user prompts.
The newer piece, AI Marketer, goes further. It scans a brand’s own data, flags where it is losing visibility, and deploys sub-agents to draft content, run competitive research and, through a new Ads Studio, launch paid AI Search campaigns directly into OpenAI’s, Google’s and Meta’s ad managers.
“Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose-built AI to help them do the work,” said Cadwallader, Profound’s co-founder and chief executive.
The rise of the agentic marketer
Profound’s latest product push centres on AI Marketer, which acts as an AI marketing teammate rather than simply an analytics dashboard.
It can scan brand data, analyse AI-generated answers, identify opportunities and deploy sub-agents to carry out marketing tasks. Its Context Manager provides the underlying brand memory by synthesising knowledge-base files, meeting transcripts and communication threads. That is designed to let the AI Marketer adapt as a company’s positioning and working style change.
“As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows,” said Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “Profound started with AI Search and is now expanding into a much broader platform for how modern marketing teams operate. James, Dylan, and the team have paired deep domain expertise with real technical rigor, and we’re excited to continue backing them as they build the AI platform for the agentic web.”
Profound is also extending the platform into paid marketing through Ads Studio, allowing teams to create, launch and manage AI Search campaigns across OpenAI, Google and Meta’s ad managers.
“This feels like a cheat code. We can launch creative in minutes. A must for AI Search ads,” said William Yen, Head of Strategic Growth Initiatives at Ramp.
A crowded field leaning towards the same shift
Profound isn’t alone in chasing what the industry calls answer engine optimisation, or AEO. Berlin’s Peec AI raised a $21 million Series A in November 2025, taking its total to roughly $29 million, and has leaned into accessible pricing for agencies rather than the enterprise. Bluefish raised a $43 million Series B in April, bringing its total to $68 million, and competes more directly for the same Fortune 500 accounts.
Where Profound tries to differentiate is scope: it isn’t just measuring visibility, it’s trying to be the system that acts on it, positioning itself as an operating platform rather than another dashboard in a crowded AEO/GEO category.
Both Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have backed this kind of category bet before. Sequoia’s portfolio includes Stripe, Airbnb and WhatsApp; Kleiner Perkins, under partner Ilya Fushman, has backed Harvey, Rippling and the now-Atlassian-owned Loom.
“As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows. James, Dylan and the team have paired deep domain expertise with real technical rigour,” added Fushman.
The market they’re chasing is real but young. The global generative engine optimisation services market was worth about $1 billion in 2025 and could reach $17 billion by 2034, growing 45.5% a year, as more Fortune 500 chief marketing officers name it a top digital priority. Profound says its own revenue has tripled over the past six months, though that figure comes from the company and hasn’t been independently verified.
Whether AI Marketer becomes the system brands actually trust to publish and spend on their behalf, or whether it’s a feature the AI platforms themselves eventually build in-house, is the question a $1.8 billion valuation is now betting on.
