Profound, a startup helping brands maintain visibility in AI-powered search engines, has raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, nearly double its worth from seven months ago. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons.

Why Does This Matter as AI Search Reshapes Discovery?

The way people search is changing fundamentally. Instead of typing keywords into Google, consumers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity what to buy, and they act on whatever answer comes back. Profound's mission is straightforward: make sure brands don't vanish inside those AI-generated responses. The company now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100.

This funding round reflects a broader shift in how venture capital views marketing technology. The global generative engine optimization services market was worth approximately $1 billion in 2025 and could reach $17 billion by 2034, growing at 45.5% annually, according to market projections cited in the funding announcement. That explosive growth potential is what's attracting heavyweight investors like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

How Does Profound's Platform Help Brands Compete in AI Search?

• Analytics and Monitoring: The platform tracks how often ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention a brand, in what context, and against which competitors, drawing on more than two billion real user prompts to provide visibility insights.
• AI Marketer Agent: The newer AI Marketer product scans a brand's own data, flags where visibility is being lost, and deploys sub-agents to draft content, run competitive research, and launch paid AI Search campaigns directly into OpenAI's, Google's, and Meta's ad managers.
• Context Manager: This underlying system synthesizes knowledge-base files, meeting transcripts, and communication threads to provide brand memory, allowing the AI Marketer to adapt as a company's positioning and working style change over time.
• Ads Studio: Teams can create, launch, and manage AI Search campaigns across multiple platforms, with early users reporting they can launch creative in minutes rather than hours or days.

Profound's approach positions itself as an operating platform rather than just another analytics dashboard in what's becoming a crowded category. The company competes with Berlin-based Peec AI, which raised $21 million in Series A funding in November 2025 and focuses on accessible pricing for agencies, and Bluefish, which raised $43 million in Series B funding in April 2026 and competes more directly for Fortune 500 accounts.

"Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose-built AI to help them do the work," said James Cadwallader, Profound's co-founder and chief executive.

James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO at Profound

Profound was founded in 2024 by Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, who met at startup incubator South Park Commons. Cadwallader previously built Kyra, an influencer-marketing agency that worked with Fortune 500 brands, while Babbs was a design engineer at Uber. The New York-based company is now opening an applied-AI research operation in San Francisco with the new capital to study how well frontier AI models handle marketing work.

What's Driving Investor Confidence in This Category?

Both Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have backed category-defining bets before. Sequoia's portfolio includes Stripe, Airbnb, and WhatsApp; Kleiner Perkins, under partner Ilya Fushman, has backed Harvey, Rippling, and the now-Atlassian-owned Loom.

"As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows. James, Dylan, and the team have paired deep domain expertise with real technical rigor," noted Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins.

Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins

The funding brings Profound's total capital raised to more than $335 million since 2024, following a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation led by Lightspeed in February 2026. The company reports that its own revenue has tripled over the past six months, though this figure comes from the company and hasn't been independently verified.

The central question now is whether AI Marketer becomes the system brands actually trust to publish and spend on their behalf, or whether it remains a feature that AI platforms themselves eventually build in-house. At a $1.8 billion valuation, investors are betting that Profound's combination of domain expertise and technical execution will win that race.