Series B led by Sequoia Capital accelerates Profound’s evolution into the command center for modern marketing as brands race to control their AI presence
Profound, the platform that helps businesses control how they appear in AI responses, announces a $35 million Series B round led by Sequoia with continued participation from Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons. This brings Profound’s total funding to $58.5 million.
Since launching less than a year ago, Profound has attracted major high-growth and enterprise customers including Ramp, US Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign, and Chime. More than 2,000 marketers from over 500 organizations now rely on the platform daily as companies race to establish their presence in the AI-first internet.
“Profound’s vision extends well beyond AI-powered SEO. The Profound platform has the potential to become the command center that empowers businesses to stand out and succeed in the age of superintelligence,” said Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia.
AI Search is the Next Platform Shift
ChatGPT now has 700M weekly users, 4x since last year. More than 60 percent of consumers now start product research with AI assistants, not search engines. We’re entering a “zero-click world” where AI conversations become a consumer’s first impression of your brand.
Showing up in platforms like ChatGPT is the new board-level discussion; in fact, the CEO of Reddit actually quoted Profound in their Q2 earnings report. By 2026, every company, not just the Fortune 500, will need to control how AI interfaces with their brand. Eventually agents won’t just talk about your products but will purchase and even utilize them.
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“We’re in the midst of the most significant shift in how consumers discover and research products since the dawn of the internet,” said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound. “AI assistants are becoming the new front door to every business. If you’re not showing up in those conversations, you’re invisible to billions of consumers.”
The Command Center for Modern Marketing
Profound is the first marketing platform built specifically for the AI-first internet. The platform delivers the complete workflow modern marketers need:
- Monitor: See how AI describes your brand with Answer Engine Insights, understand how agents crawl and interpret websites with Agent Analytics, and discover what the world is asking AI with Conversation Explorer – all powered by the market’s largest real user dataset.
- Create: Automatically generate AI-optimized content, built for bots not humans. From comparison articles to social posts, Profound’s Actions feature has already helped customers create thousands of pieces of targeted content that AI systems actively cite and recommend, resulting in a 700 percent increase in AI referrals in some cases.
- Orchestrate: Deploy a fleet of ambient and interactive agents that give a single marketer the power of an entire agency. Lean teams can now launch comprehensive, AI-optimized marketing campaigns in minutes instead of months.
“We’re building a marketing platform for the age of superintelligence,” said Cadwallader. “Today, Profound gives thousands of marketers the ability to understand and influence how AI systems talk about their products – all without requiring a huge team to do the work.”
Source: PRNewswire