Profound has raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation as the company expands from AI search analytics into a broader agentic platform designed to perform work across marketing organizations. The round was 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 financing comes less than seven months after Profound’s $96 million Series C.
Profound now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands and over one-third of the Fortune 100. Customers include Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma.
The company initially built tools that help marketers understand how brands appear in AI-powered search and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It is now expanding into AI Marketer, an agent orchestrator that can perform research, write content, report on results and deploy specialized sub-agents across marketing workflows.
AI Marketer scans brand data and AI-generated answers to identify opportunities. Its Context Manager continuously synthesizes company files, meeting transcripts, communication threads and individual working styles so the system can adapt as brand positioning changes.
Profound is also extending the platform into paid marketing through Ads Studio, which can create ads, apply campaign-wide edits, analyze performance and optimize bidding across OpenAI, Google and Meta advertising environments.
The company will use part of the Series D to expand its applied AI research operations in New York and San Francisco. Researchers are developing benchmarks for complex marketing assignments and post-training models specifically for marketing tasks.
Profound’s platform is built on more than 2 billion real user prompts, which the company uses to analyze what consumers ask AI systems and how those systems respond.
KEY QUOTES:
“Profound started as an analytics platform for marketers to understand how buyers discover their brands through AI. Today, they’re using our Agents to research, write, and report. Now, we’re delivering AI Marketer as an Agent orchestrator that works alongside every function of your marketing team.”
James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO of Profound
“As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows. Profound started with AI Search and is now expanding into a much broader platform for how modern marketing teams operate.”
Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins
“The world’s largest brands are moving fast to put AI to work across their marketing teams, and Profound has established itself as the applied AI lab they rely on.”
Anas Biad, Partner at Sequoia Capital
