Enterprise Account Executive

Unveilr AI raises pre-seed from AJVC at ₹16.7 cr valuation. Unveilr AI has raised pre-seed funding from AJVC at a ₹16.7 crore valuation. The amount was undisclosed, but AJVC's standard ₹1.5 crore for 9% divides to exactly that number. Unveilr AI, a Mumbai company that tries to get brands named inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude answers, has raised pre-seed funding from Aviral Bhatnagar's AJVC at a ₹16.7 crore valuation. The amount was not disclosed. It is, however, derivable. AJVC's standard pre-seed deal is ₹1.5 crore for 9%, and ₹1.5 crore at 9% implies a post-money valuation of ₹16.67 crore. That is the ₹16.7 crore figure, to the decimal. The pattern holds across the portfolio too: Multibagg AI, Mindcase and Slayd each raised exactly ₹1.5 crore from the same fund. So this is almost certainly a ₹1.5 crore cheque on house terms. That matters because it sets the altitude. AJVC closed its maiden fund at ₹200 crore and writes roughly the same cheque into every company, which makes it a volume business: 25 to 35 companies in, a target of around 90 over the fund's life, and a founder who ran enterprise software and AI investing at Venture Highway before setting up on his own. Being backed by AJVC is a signal about stage, not about a bespoke conviction bet. Answer engine optimisation exists because an AI answer behaves differently from a results page. Ten blue links give a brand a chance at position seven; an AI answer names two or three companies and stops. Everyone else is invisible, not merely further down. That is a genuine structural change in how buyers shortlist, and it has produced a real market in under two years. It is also a market with a very expensive top end. Profound raised a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed, with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins participating, at a $1 billion valuation, making it the category's first unicorn. Peec AI, founded in Berlin in early 2025, has raised about $30 million across seed and Series A. AthenaHQ has raised $2.7 million. Meanwhile Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz have all built or bought AI visibility features, and Adobe, Salesforce and HubSpot are folding the capability into their platforms. Unveilr enters that at a valuation of roughly $1.9 million. Read quickly, that gap looks fatal. Read properly, it is a different business. Profound and Peec sell software: a dashboard, a subscription, no humans in the loop. Unveilr pairs its own agents with SEO and AEO specialists who then write the content and do the technical work, and it measures itself on leads delivered rather than on visibility scores. That is an agency with proprietary tooling, and agencies are priced on people rather than on revenue multiples. A ₹16.7 crore valuation for an eight-month-old services business is unremarkable, where the same number attached to a SaaS platform trying to catch Profound would be nonsense. The two companies are not really competing for the same thing, which is the point most coverage of this category keeps missing. The open question is which one it intends to become. Services revenue is real revenue and it arrives early, but it scales with headcount and it does not compound the way a software subscription does. The founder's own stated thesis is about compounding. What the company says it has done. Unveilr reports that for an Indian B2B legal services platform it lifted AI-sourced traffic about 4.7 times and leads five times, with roughly 80% more ChatGPT citations, and that for one direct-to-consumer brand organic search now drives about 27% of total revenue. Neither customer is named and neither figure is independently verifiable, which is the normal state of agency case studies rather than a mark against these ones. The company says customers typically see movement inside the first month. "A buyer today asks ChatGPT which lawyer, clinic or software to choose and gets two or three names back. If a brand isn't one of them, it has lost that lead before its website ever loads," said Sanditya Srivastava, founder and chief executive. "Referrals and paid campaigns bring in customers, but they don't compound. Organic visibility does." Aviral Bhatnagar framed the investment around usage inside his own portfolio. "Unveilr's strong adoption in our large AJVC portfolio is a sign of its general-purpose utility," he said. There is something concrete behind that: Multibagg, an AJVC company that raised its own ₹1.5 crore from the fund, sits among the customer logos on Unveilr's site alongside LexComply, Advarisk and Caredale. It is also a bounded signal, because a fund's portfolio companies are a friendly first market and adoption there is easier to win than adoption outside it. Where it goes next. The money funds engineering capacity to widen what the agents do, and a bigger sales team covering India, the UAE and the United States. The company launched in February 2026, which makes it roughly eight months old, and says its team combines IIT alumni with SEO and AEO specialists. It has been named company of the year in AI search by siliconindia and listed in Inc42's startups to watch. For anyone tracking this space, the useful comparison is not Unveilr against Profound. It is whether the Indian, UAE and US mid-market will pay for execution rather than dashboards, in a category where the tooling is commoditising fast and the incumbents are bundling it in free. The services layer is the part software cannot copy quickly. It is also the part that gets squeezed when visibility tracking becomes a checkbox inside a platform a brand already pays for. Plenty of Indian operators are already selling this service without a fund behind them, which tells you the demand is real and the barrier to entry is not. What ₹1.5 crore buys is a head start on turning that service into a product, and roughly eighteen months to prove it, which is what this year's funding data suggests a pre-seed now has to show before anyone writes the next cheque.

Profound raises $180 million in Series D at $1.8 billion valuation. September 16, 2026 AI marketing startup Profound has raised $180 million in a Series D funding round at a valuation of $1.8 billion, reaching unicorn status less than seven months after its previous funding round. The latest investment comes as businesses increasingly look to understand and improve how their brands appear across AI-powered search and answer engines. The Series D was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons also participating. The new round follows Profound's $96 million Series C announced earlier this year. Profound initially built an analytics platform that helped marketers understand how consumers discover brands through AI systems. The company has since expanded its platform beyond analytics, offering tools that allow marketing teams to research, create and execute campaigns using AI. The startup operates in the emerging area of Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), which focuses on helping brands improve their visibility as consumers increasingly use AI systems for search, product research and brand discovery. Profound's platform is designed to help businesses understand what people ask AI systems and how those systems respond about their brands. Profound said it now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group and Royal Bank of Canada. Its customer base also includes technology companies such as Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma. The company said its platform is used by more than one-third of Fortune 100 companies. The company has also expanded its product offering with an AI Marketer designed to work alongside marketing teams. The system can analyse brand data, examine AI-generated answers, identify opportunities and deploy specialised agents to perform marketing-related tasks. Profound's AI Marketer is supported by its Context Manager, which brings together information such as company knowledge-base files, meeting transcripts and communication threads. According to the company, the system uses this information to maintain an understanding of a company's brand context and working style as those elements evolve. The company has also introduced Ads Studio, which enables marketers to create, launch and manage AI Search advertising campaigns. The platform is designed to bring organic and paid AI-search activities together while allowing marketers to track campaign performance and make changes across campaigns. Profound plans to use the new funding to expand its applied AI research operations in New York City and San Francisco. The company said its research teams will study how advanced AI models perform on marketing-related work, evaluate their capabilities and develop models specifically for marketing applications. The research effort will also include the development of a benchmark for evaluating AI systems on complex marketing assignments. Profound said the benchmark will assess whether models can understand a business, evaluate competing market signals and produce work across different marketing functions. The latest funding follows rapid growth at the company. Profound said its revenue has increased threefold over the past six months, while its enterprise customer base has grown to more than 1,000 brands. The company's latest round therefore comes at a time when its platform is expanding from AI-search analytics into a broader AI platform for marketing teams. With the Series D, Profound has raised fresh capital to expand its AI research, develop its marketing-focused agents and broaden the capabilities of its platform. The $1.8 billion valuation also represents a significant increase from the $1 billion valuation associated with its $96 million Series C earlier this year. - Advertisement -

Profound hits $1.8B valuation as AI search marketing becomes essential infrastructure. Profound just printed a $1.8 billion valuation on $180 million of fresh Series D capital, according to UA.NEWS. Winston Abernathy, Capital & Tech Realist·updated September 16, 2026 The structure - a late-stage round at a premium mark - signals that investors are pricing the company as infrastructure for the AI-search era rather than another feature plug-in in the marketing stack. At this scale, the round functions as a category statement, not a funding event. The mechanics. * Round size: $180M Series D * Post-money valuation: $1.8B * Category: enterprise marketing software * Product: generative engine optimization - tooling that helps brands surface inside LLM-driven search outputs A Series D at this scale puts Profound in the bracket where founders typically stop diluting and start structuring secondary liquidity, strategic M&A optionality, or pre-IPO positioning. The fact that this is Series D - not B or C - tells Wealthyboss institutional conviction already exists in the cap table. Capital is no longer underwriting a product bet; it is underwriting a market position. The $1.8B post resets the GEO category on dollar terms alone. Why the bid. UA.NEWS frames the raise as a response to surging demand for AI engine optimization tools. The underlying logic is structural: generative search is redistributing attention away from blue-link SERPs, and brands need a measurable way to remain visible inside LLM-driven outputs. This is the SEO playbook rewritten for a different interface - same mechanics, a different algorithm. The $1.8B valuation places Profound alongside mature martech consolidators that took a decade to compound revenue. The implicit thesis: GEO will compress that timeline because the underlying distribution shift is faster than search engine adoption was in the early 2000s. Brands cannot afford to wait for organic experimentation; they are paying for tooling now. The verdict. Viable, with one condition. The raise is a capital event, not a revenue milestone. The $1.8B tag will hold only if GEO becomes a permanent line item in the CMO budget - the same way SEO became one after 2010 and paid media became one before it. The capital rotation now chasing category leaders, including vehicles like Volition Capital's $950M Fund VI, confirms that growth equity is treating AI-search infrastructure as a thesis-grade allocation rather than a thematic tilt. Until Profound's recurring revenue scales into the valuation, the mark is a bet on category formation, not category maturity. For founders and operators in the same lane: the AI-search layer is now priced as core infrastructure, and the next 18 months of contract velocity will determine whether that price is defended - or repriced.