Profound plans to announce on Tuesday that it closed a $180 million Series D round at a $1.8 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the financing, with participation from existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. Sequoia led the Series B in August 2025, and Kleiner Perkins led the Series A announced two months earlier.
Just six months ago, the company raised $96 million at a $1 billion valuation. With the new round, Profound has now pulled in more than $335 million to date.
Profound started with tools that quantify how often AI models mention a brand, the context in which it shows up, and the descriptions those systems provide. The pitch sits at the center of the shift from classic SEO to what many call answer engine optimization, where the aim is to shape how AI tools respond to a person's question rather than jockey for a higher web page placement. Tweaking chatbot outputs involves more moving parts, where qualities like clarity and perceived authority matter more than stuffing in trendy keywords.
Consumers are also testing AI agents, including Meta Platforms' newly introduced Muse, that behave like digital assistants and complete errands for people, such as placing grocery orders or lining up a rental car. Profound is leaning into that trend by putting more emphasis on tracking agent behavior across the web.
Profound has released its own agents that it says work alongside marketing teams, taking on some tasks people used to handle. The newest capabilities can continuously review brand presence across AI searches and, when issues such as a decline in mentions pop up, the system can suggest and carry out fixes.
The platform also links into customers' internal tools, including Gmail and Slack, so agents can do things like draft memos in the company's voice. To help clients get the most from these features, Profound employs "forward-deployed marketing engineers." Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer James Cadwallader described the role as a marketer who harnesses AI to amplify their impact, saying it "is becoming one of the most important roles in marketing, and this platform we built is for them." Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Dylan Babbs said part of the fresh capital will go toward hiring more engineers for in-house AI research to boost performance and lower costs.
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Profound says its workforce has roughly quadrupled since the beginning of the year, from about 90 people to nearly 400. While it declined to disclose current revenue, the company said sales have tripled since its February round. Customers include Comcast, Microsoft and SpaceX's Cursor.
Big names like Salesforce and Adobe still rule the enterprise marketing stack, but a wave of startups is rebuilding the category around AI. That ranges from Clay, valued at $7.1 billion, which began in sales and, last year, broadened its offering to serve marketing departments, to Higgsfield AI, a video generation platform aimed at corporate social media marketers.
Cadwallader said Profound sees itself as the default marketing software for the AI age. The company's long term view is that marketers will oversee fleets of AI agents that can surface brand visibility problems or openings and act on them on their own. For your budget, that trend line points to marketing tools getting more autonomous and, ideally, more accountable for results.
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