Data Scientist

Ex-Swiggy, Zomato executives launch AI startup Profound, raise $1.5 mn. Profound helps users find career opportunities, make introductions and connect with employers. (L-R) Anuj Rathi, Co-Founder and CEO and Prashant Parashar, Co-Founder and CTO, Profound Former Swiggy and Zomato executives Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar have launched Profound, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to give every professional an AI-powered representative. The company said it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding and opened early access to its first group of users after several months of product development and customer research. Rathi and Parashar bring more than two decades of experience building consumer products, growth systems and technology platforms used by millions of people. The seed round saw participation from technology founders and entrepreneurs, including Swiggy Cofounders Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy; Zomato Cofounder Pankaj Chaddah and Razorpay Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Cofounder Harshil Mathur. Other investors include Kunal Shah, global head, WhatsApp; and Bhuvan Gupta, cofounder, OfBusiness. The round also included institutional participation from Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital. The company will use the funding to strengthen its engineering and product teams, expand its AI capabilities and accelerate development of its matching and introductions engine. Over the next year, Profound plans to build its founding network and onboard 1 million professionals globally ahead of a broader beta rollout. "Just as actors have agents and athletes have managers, Profound gives each professional their own AI Rep," said Rathi, cofounder and CEO, Profound. "It learns your work and your judgment, and keeps you ready for the next move and the connection that has the potential to change your career trajectory. This is what the future of work looks like when representation is available to everyone." At Profound, every professional receives an AI Rep that begins with a 30-minute voice conversation. It develops a continuously evolving understanding of a person's experience, expertise, judgment, working style, ambitions and context. The AI Rep works in the background on behalf of professionals, identifies relevant opportunities, facilitates meaningful introductions and helps build stronger professional relationships and careers. Parashar, cofounder and chief technology officer, said voice AI has reached a point where a machine can hold a genuinely curious conversation. "We built the reasoning layer that turns those conversations into an AI Rep," he said. "That richer understanding of a professional enables significantly better matches, shifting professional discovery from keyword-based search to intelligence-driven matchmaking," he said. Profound also enables hiring managers to create AI Reps for roles and teams. Through natural conversations, founders and hiring leaders can capture far deeper context than a conventional job description, enabling more accurate talent discovery, stronger matches, meaningful introductions and more effective collaboration. Rahul Chowdhri, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners, said there is a growing gap between how good someone is at their job and how easy they are to find. "Resumes and LinkedIn profiles capture titles, not judgment," said Chowdhri. "Profound uses a voice-first, AI-native approach to build an always-on 'AI Rep' that represents professionals with far greater depth. We are excited to back the team as they build the professional OS for the AI era." Pranav Pai, managing partner at 3one4 Capital, said the biggest constraint in hiring today is not the supply of talent but the ability to verify fit. "Resumes and static profiles cannot capture judgment, working style or real context," said Pai. "Profound is rebuilding that layer for an AI-first world, and we are backing the team as they redefine how professionals are understood and matched." Profound is now available through an early-access programme for its first cohort, with broader beta access planned later this year. Looking ahead, the company envisions a professional ecosystem where AI Reps interact with one another on behalf of individuals and organisations. This enables richer discovery, trusted introductions, and new ways to build careers, teams, and businesses.

iPullRank, an enterprise AI search agency, has been named a Profound Agency Partner, formalising collaboration across enterprise programmes, product development, and measurement. The New York-based agency uses Profound's citation and visibility data to help brands understand their presence in AI search platforms. iPullRank contributed three launch agents to the Profound Agent Template Marketplace: the Citation Gap Engine, Query Fan-Out Coverage Auditor, and Explanatory Power Index Audit. These tools bring components of iPullRank's Relevance Engineering methodology to marketing teams. "Profound is the rocket ship and we're the jetpack travelling on the same path," said Mike King, founder and CEO of iPullRank. The partnership provides brands with integrated systems for understanding and improving AI search performance across answer engines.

Profound's competitors in GEO: who is building the AI visibility category in 2026. Profound raised $58.5 million from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins and established itself as the enterprise GEO category leader. But the market it pioneered is expanding fast. New entrants are arriving from SEO (Ahrefs, Semrush), e-commerce analytics (Cognizo), and purpose-built GEO platforms (MeetGEO, AgentSite, xSeek). Understanding who is competing - and on what dimensions - tells you both where the category is headed and which tool actually fits your use case. The three competitive fronts. The GEO platform market is not a single race. It is three overlapping competitions, each with different dynamics. Enterprise GEO monitoring - tracking brand citation rates at scale across multiple LLMs, measuring share of voice against competitors, and providing the analytics infrastructure for a dedicated GEO function. Profound owns this segment today. Mid-market and SMB GEO tools - accessible monitoring, diagnostic tools, and content support for teams that do not have a dedicated GEO function or a $400/month budget. This segment is where most of the competition is happening right now. Vertical GEO - specialized platforms for e-commerce (product-level citation tracking, ChatGPT Ads integration), local business (Business Profile optimization), and emerging verticals. Cognizo is the clearest example of vertical specialization. Profound: The established enterprise leader. Profound's position rests on three foundations: the depth of its measurement infrastructure (agent-level analytics that show what AI crawlers actually read), the breadth of its workflow tools (AIM Agent for automated GEO, FactCheck + Mention Refresh for inaccurate claim correction), and its research output (the ChatGPT Shopping breakdown, the consumer AI white paper, the 32-million-citation AI Mode dataset). The July 2026 consumer AI white paper is particularly relevant for positioning. Profound's economist Jennifer Zou found that over 80% of AI assistant users worry about their data - and that users value keeping human reviewers out of their conversations at $11.20 per month, nearly 4x what they would pay to stop model training. This is enterprise-grade primary research that Profound uses to establish thought leadership and inform its product roadmap. No competitor is publishing at this level yet. Profound's weaknesses are the obvious ones: $399/month minimum for meaningful features, sales-required for enterprise, no free tier, and feature depth that outstrips most teams' ability to act on the data. Cognizo: the e-commerce specialist. Cognizo is the most differentiated competitor in the category. While Profound covers 3 AI engines on its Growth plan, Cognizo tracks 10: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Meta AI, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek. This breadth matters more for e-commerce and retail brands - where Meta AI, Copilot, and DeepSeek are meaningful citation surfaces - than for B2B software companies. The ChatGPT Ads integration is Cognizo's clearest competitive moat against Profound. As ChatGPT advertising matures, the ability to manage AI search visibility and ChatGPT Ads spend in a single platform creates a genuine workflow advantage for media-buying teams. Cognizo is also aggressive with content: its AI share of voice measurement methodology, its 25-step AI search visibility checklist, and its e-commerce GEO tool comparison all target high-intent educational queries. The content velocity is increasing. MeetGEO: the accessible alternative. MeetGEO competes on accessibility and diagnostic depth. The free AI crawler checker and schema validator are the only tools in the category that answer the foundational question - "can AI engines actually access my content?" - without a subscription. The free AI citation audit extends this to "is my brand being cited, and where?" For teams evaluating GEO platforms, MeetGEO's free tools often reveal the issues that need to be fixed before paid monitoring produces meaningful data. A site with GPTBot blocked in robots.txt will show low citation rates regardless of which monitoring platform you use - and finding that fix takes two minutes with the crawler checker. The paid tiers provide continuous citation monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. The positioning is deliberately accessible: no minimum commitment, no sales process, self-serve entry. SEO platform entrants: Ahrefs and Semrush. Both Ahrefs (Brand Radar) and Semrush (AI Overviews tracking) have added AI visibility features to existing SEO platforms. Neither is positioned as a primary GEO platform - they are incremental additions to existing product suites. Ahrefs Brand Radar provides ChatGPT and limited multi-LLM brand mention tracking. It ranks third in at least one independent AEO tools comparison (behind xSeek and Profound). The strength is the existing Ahrefs user base - teams that already use Ahrefs for backlink analysis and keyword research can add AI visibility without a new vendor relationship. Semrush's AI Overviews feature is Google-only. It does not track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini. For teams focused exclusively on Google AI surfaces, it is useful - but it does not compete with Profound or MeetGEO as a multi-LLM GEO tool. Emerging Players: AgentSite and xSeek. AgentSite published a "vs. Profound" comparison page in July 2026, positioning itself as a Profound alternative. Limited public information on coverage methodology or pricing. xSeek published its own "10 Best AEO Tools 2026" roundup, rating itself number one ahead of Profound and Ahrefs Brand Radar. MeetGEO was not included in xSeek's list - which is a content gap that today's posts address directly. Three trends are shaping the competitive dynamics for the rest of 2026. Research as moat. Profound is investing heavily in proprietary data publication - the 32 million citation dataset, the 201,000 ChatGPT Shopping prompt analysis, the consumer AI white paper. This type of primary research is expensive to produce and creates durable SEO authority. Competitors that cannot match this level of research output will compete on price and accessibility, not on thought leadership. Vertical specialization. The GEO market is large enough to support vertical specialists. Cognizo's e-commerce positioning shows the model: pick a vertical with enough AI search volume, build the specific features that vertical needs (product-level tracking, ad integration), and own that segment before the horizontal platforms catch up. Free tier as acquisition strategy. MeetGEO's free audit and tools are the clearest example of using free tools to build top-of-funnel awareness in a market where most buyers do not yet know they have a problem. As GEO awareness increases, the teams that have been using free diagnostic tools will be the natural upgrade customers for paid monitoring. The category is in its first major competitive cycle. The platforms that establish clear positioning - enterprise leader, vertical specialist, accessible alternative - will be harder to displace than those that try to compete on all dimensions simultaneously. Who are Profound's main competitors in GEO? Profound's main competitors in generative engine optimization are Cognizo (e-commerce/retail specialist with 10-engine tracking), MeetGEO (accessible multi-LLM citation monitoring with free diagnostic tools), and emerging platforms including AgentSite and xSeek. Traditional SEO platforms Ahrefs (Brand Radar) and Semrush (AI Overviews) have added limited AI visibility features but are not positioned as primary GEO platforms. What makes Profound different from other GEO tools? Profound's key differentiators are agent-level analytics (showing what AI crawlers actually read before generating answers), the AIM Agent for automated GEO optimization workflows, FactCheck + Mention Refresh for inaccurate claim correction, and the depth of its proprietary research publication (ChatGPT Shopping analysis, consumer AI white paper). These features are not replicated by any current competitor. How many AI engines does Profound track? Profound tracks ChatGPT on its Starter plan ($99/mo), adds two more engines on Growth ($399/mo), and covers up to 10 engines on Enterprise. Cognizo tracks 10 engines on its standard plans. MeetGEO tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Is there a free GEO alternative to Profound? MeetGEO offers a free AI citation audit, a free AI crawler checker, and a free schema validator - the core diagnostic layer of GEO - at no cost. These tools do not require account creation or a sales call. Paid monitoring tiers are available at significantly lower prices than Profound. What is the best GEO tool for a business just starting with generative engine optimization? Start with MeetGEO's free audit and diagnostic tools to establish your baseline and fix any technical access barriers (robots.txt, schema). Once your foundation is solid, evaluate paid monitoring platforms - MeetGEO for accessible multi-LLM tracking, Cognizo for e-commerce, or Profound for enterprise scale - based on your specific use case.