Profound raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, the company said Wednesday. The round, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, arrives less than seven months after a $96 million Series C and signals investor conviction that AI is reshaping how marketing teams operate.
The company, which started as an analytics platform for tracking brand visibility in AI-powered search engines, is now building AI Marketer - an agent orchestrator designed to handle research, content creation, reporting, and campaign deployment across marketing organizations. More than 1,000 enterprise brands use the platform, including Walmart, Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, and over one-third of the Fortune 100.
From search analytics to agent orchestration
Profound's early tools helped marketers understand how their brands appear in AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The new platform expands well beyond that. AI Marketer scans brand data and AI-generated answers to surface opportunities, while a component called Context Manager continuously synthesizes company files, meeting transcripts, communication threads, and individual working styles so the system adapts as brand positioning shifts.
The company is also moving into paid marketing. Ads Studio, a new module, creates ads, applies campaign-wide edits, analyzes performance, and optimizes bidding across advertising environments from OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Research investment and underlying data
Part of the Series D funding will expand Profound's applied AI research operations in New York and San Francisco. The research team is developing benchmarks for complex marketing assignments and building post-training models specifically tuned for marketing tasks. The platform draws on more than 2 billion real user prompts to analyze what consumers ask AI systems and how those systems respond.
Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons also participated in the round. Customers include Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma.
What leadership is saying
"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," said James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound.
Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman said, "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."
Anas Biad, partner at Sequoia Capital, added, "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."
Why this matters for marketers
Profound's trajectory mirrors a shift that working marketers are already feeling: AI is moving from a measurement and analytics tool into something that performs actual marketing work. The platform's agent orchestrator model suggests a future where marketing teams manage constellations of specialized AI sub-agents rather than executing every task manually. For marketing managers building skills for that shift, AI for Marketing Managers training paths and AI for Marketing Courses offer structured ways to get ahead of the curve. The funding - $180 million at a valuation nearly double the company's previous round - indicates that investors expect this operational model to become standard inside large marketing organizations.
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