Profound Raises $180M Series D, Hits $1.8B Valuation to Build the AI Platform for Marketing

Buyers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to recommend brands instead of typing a search query, and that has blown up the surface area marketers have to cover. An answer engine may draw on hundreds of thousands of sources to form an opinion of a single brand — Profound puts the number at roughly 350,000. On June 3, Cloudflare reported that bot traffic had overtaken human traffic on the web for the first time in history.

From AI-search analytics to a marketing-wide AI teammate

Profound started as an analytics platform showing marketers how buyers discover their brand through AI — a practice it calls AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). It has since expanded into “AI Marketer” (internally called Aim), an agent orchestrator that works alongside every function of a marketing team — scanning brand data, surfacing opportunities, and deploying sub-agents to research, write, publish and report. A “Context Manager” underpins Aim, synthesizing company knowledge and individual working style. Its newest product, Ads Studio, lets marketers build and manage AI-search ad campaigns across OpenAI, Google and Meta’s ad managers.

Profound was founded in 2024 by CEO James Cadwallader, a serial marketing entrepreneur, and CTO Dylan Babbs, a former Uber engineer. The two met at South Park Commons, the San Francisco community and early-stage fund.

$180M round pushes valuation to $1.8B

Profound announced a $180 million Series D co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons participating. The round values Profound at $1.8 billion, up from the $1 billion valuation it reached at its Series C just seven months earlier, in February 2026. Total funding raised to date is now $335 million.

Profound now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100 — Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group and Royal Bank of Canada, alongside Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma.

The competitive field

Scrunch AI focuses on monitoring AI-bot crawling and serving machine-readable pages to agents. Peec AI is known for sentiment and geographic segmentation. AthenaHQ adds an action layer letting brands budget directly against AI responses. Y Combinator-backed The Prompting Company raised a $6.5 million seed round last October.

Profound plans to use the funding to expand its applied AI research team in New York and San Francisco, studying frontier-model performance on marketing tasks.