Profound Raises $96M At $1B Valuation To Build AI-Native Marketing Infrastructure
Profound closed a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Saga VC, South Park Commons, and Evantic joined the round. The company has now raised more than $155 million, just one day shy of its 18-month mark.
The pitch is direct: brand discovery is shifting to AI. Answer engines and agents are making recommendations and completing transactions, and marketers need a way to understand and influence how machines represent their brand.
Why this matters for marketers
Profound says it serves 10% of the Fortune 500 and more than 700 enterprises across CPG, financial services, retail, pharma, consumer tech, and B2B tech. Named customers include Target, Figma, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank.
The platform was recognized as a Top 50 AI Product in G2's Best Software Products 2026, ranking No. 34 across all B2B software. You can check the list on G2.
From measurement to influence
Profound started with tracking brand visibility, sentiment, and performance across AI answer engines. As AI-driven discovery expands beyond traditional search, the company is pushing customers to shift from measurement to influence.
The software combines analytics, content generation, and autonomous execution in one system. The goal: close the loop between insights and action without handoffs.
Profound Agents: from concept to execution
Central to the product are Profound Agents-customizable autonomous workers that compress the time from idea to output. Driven by reasoning models and proprietary data, they monitor signals, parse intent, generate content, and adjust strategy in real time.
More than 500 customers use Agents daily. Common workflows include content agents, monitoring agents, AEO agents, and PR agents to scale day-to-day marketing.
Customer examples
- Deel scaled its content engine using agent workflows and automations.
- MongoDB automated AI visibility reporting.
- Plaid deployed AEO-optimized FAQs across hundreds of pages.
Ecosystem and the rise of the Marketing Engineer
Profound is rolling out an ecosystem for agencies and consultants to build AI-native services on its platform. That includes Profound University, a community certification path focused on AI search, and an Agency Marketplace to match brands with certified partners.
The company is positioning a new "Marketing Engineer" role-part marketer, part data thinker, fluent in agent workflows.
What to do next
- Audit your presence across AI answer engines. Identify top intents, questions, and competitive gaps where machines summarize your brand.
- Ship machine-readable assets. Create concise FAQs, comparisons, and buying guides with clear answers and citations. Add structured data where it helps AEO.
- Pilot agent workflows. Start with content agents for briefs and drafts, monitoring agents for brand mentions, and AEO agents to test FAQ coverage at scale.
- Close the loop. Connect insights to your CMS and PR calendar so approved updates publish fast with guardrails.
- Set governance. Keep human-in-the-loop review, brand safety checks, and data policies tight.
- Level up skills. See the AI Learning Path for SEO Specialists to train your team on AEO and AI search.
Key quotes
Sachin Patel, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners: "Profound Agents expand the product from visibility to autonomous execution, positioning them to define how marketing is done in an agentic world. They are building the marketing platform for the future of discovery."
James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound: "AI Search is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing. As AI Agents act for consumers to research, compare, and transact, brands need their own Agents doing the same thing on the other side. That agent-to-agent dynamic is where discovery, marketing, and commerce are headed. We're giving marketers a toolkit that can act as an extension of their team and scale on their behalf."
Anja Simic, Director of Content Marketing at Deel: "A lot of our success is built on [Agent] workflows and automations."
Sarah Shaffer, Organic Growth Specialist at Plaid: "Profound [Agent] workflows have allowed us to thoughtfully incorporate AI search into our content optimizations."
Bottom line
The "zero-click internet" is here. If AI systems decide what gets seen and bought, your brand needs the data, the content, and the agents to win those decisions-on repeat.
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