Profound Completes $180 Million Series D Valued at $1.8 Billion

New York AI marketing company Profound has completed a $180 million Series D funding round, valuing the company at $1.8 billion, with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-leading the investment. Lightspeed, Khosla, Saga, South Park Commons, and new investor Evantic participated in the round. Founded in 2024, the company has raised over $335 million in total funding.

This round comes less than seven months after the $960 million Series C round, which had a valuation of about $1 billion. The company's products have expanded from monitoring brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI summaries to research, writing, deployment, and agency orchestration. The company has launched AI Marketer (Aim), Context Manager, and Ads Studio, and plans to establish application labs in New York and San Francisco for model retraining in marketing scenarios.

Profound has over 1,000 corporate brand clients, including Comcast, Estée Lauder, Walmart, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, Figma, Campari, and the Royal Bank of Canada. The company claims to cover over one-third of the Fortune 100, with about 16% of the Fortune 500; external reports have mentioned 18%. In the past six months, the company claims its revenue has grown approximately threefold, although it has not disclosed absolute revenue figures.

Co-founder James Cadwallader stated that clients have used agencies for research, writing, and reporting, and the new platform aims to enable marketing teams to undertake campaigns they previously lacked the capacity for. External commentary highlights three aspects of the company's competitive advantage: analyzing over 100 million AI responses monthly across about 18 countries; establishing "marketing engineers" as trusted contacts for target audiences; and training domain toolkits using AEO data, existing tools, and business context.

Market-wise, this represents a new budget entry point as search shifts from links to answers: brands are purchasing visibility and messaging in model responses, while selling is limited to old SEO contracts that only optimize Google blue links. Beneficiaries include monitoring companies that have stockpiled response data; those under pressure include modules in Salesforce and Adobe Marketing Cloud that have yet to separately allocate "answer engine" budgets, as well as a plethora of GEO/AEO tools. The rapid doubling of valuation compared to public revenue indicates that pricing is still based on category bets rather than profit margins.

Additionally, Sequoia and Kleiner have led three out of the four funding rounds for the company. Monitoring and recommendations remain the primary focus, while implementation and public relations execution are largely left to client teams.

Source: Public Information