Profound co-founders James Cadwallader (from left) and Dylan Babbs. Credit: Profound Profound, an enterprise-grade marketing platform built for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), has raised $180M in a Series D co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, valuing the two-year-old New York company at $1.8bn, Bloomberg reports. The price is nearly double what it was worth in February, when a $96M round first made it a unicorn, and it brings the total raised since 2024 to more than $335M. Both Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures invested again, as did the two lead investors, who between them have now led three of the company’s four rounds.
Founded in 2024, Profound is an analytics platform that helps brands track and improve how they appear in AI-generated search results. Companies can see how often AI models mention them, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, as well as the context in which they appear. This gives marketing and SEO teams a way to understand their visibility and compare it with competitors. With traditional search, a company could see where it ranked in a list of results.
AI search is different. Instead of a list of links, it gives users a written answer, so companies need a way to see how they are being described. That is the gap Profound was built to fill. The shift behind all of this has been running for most of the year.
Google has changed its search results into more of an answer engine, while these zero-click answers have cut traffic to publishers. As marketing budgets follow where people spend their attention, that attention is moving to AI search, where traditional SEO tools cannot tell companies much about how they are being represented. Profound is now looking beyond AI search to agents. The company tracks how AI agents browse the web, as more of the software reading a company’s website is becoming automated rather than human.
Meta launched Muse last week, an AI agent designed to book, buy and negotiate on behalf of users. If these agents become common, companies may increasingly be dealing with software that reads about their products and compares them with other options. Profound has also built agents of its own, which monitor brand mentions and can suggest, and in some cases make, changes when a company’s visibility drops. These agents can connect to tools such as Gmail and Slack, allowing them to work in a company’s own voice.
The company also has people it calls “forward-deployed marketing engineers” working alongside the technology. Chief executive James Cadwallader, who co-founded the company, said that the role “is becoming one of the most important roles in marketing, and this platform we built is for them”. The company has not disclosed its revenue, however, making it difficult to judge whether its $1.8bn valuation reflects a growing business or a big bet on a category that is still taking shape. While Salesforce and Adobe still control much of the enterprise marketing market, a growing group of startups is trying to build marketing around AI.
Among them, Clay is already valued at $7.1bn after moving from sales into marketing, while Higgsfield AI is selling AI video to corporate social teams. The bigger risk is that none of these companies can fully control. Their business depends on AI models continuing to mention and describe brands in ways that can be measured and influenced.
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