Profound Raises $35M Series B as AI Search Becomes the Next Platform Shift
NEW YORK, Aug. 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Profound, the platform that helps businesses control how they appear in AI responses, today 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.
"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."
Explosive Traction and Investment
The new funding comes as enterprise demand has exploded, with Profound's customer base growing across multiple verticals including Financial Services, B2B SaaS, CPG, Retail, and more. Early customers report dramatic improvements in AI visibility, with some seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue coming directly from AI assistants mentioning their products and services.
The new capital will accelerate Profound's agentic workflow features, expand its content generation capabilities, and support international expansion as global brands seek to establish AI presence across multiple markets and languages.
"Profound has established itself as the definitive platform for AI visibility and content optimization. Their growth to date has been nothing short of remarkable," said Anas Biad, Partner at Sequoia and Profound board member. "As AI agents become the primary interface between consumers and brands, Profound provides the critical infrastructure every company will need to remain competitive."
About Profound
Profound is the AI visibility and content optimization platform that helps brands understand, improve, and measure how they appear in AI-powered search results. Built by alumni of AMD, Microsoft, Datadog, Uber, Bridgewater, and OpenAI, Profound equips marketers to win in a future where AI agents, not blue links, drive discovery.
Learn more at www.tryprofound.com
View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/profound-raises-35m-series-b-as-ai-search-becomes-the-next-platform-shift-302527764.html
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