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Profound raises $180M to expand AI platform for marketing teams. Published on: Sep 16, 2026 Profound has raised $180 million in a Series D round at a $1.8 billion valuation as the AI-search company expands from visibility analytics into an agentic platform designed to execute marketing work across research, content, advertising and optimization. Profound is expanding its ambitions beyond helping brands understand how they appear in AI-generated search results. The company has raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-leading the round. The financing comes less than seven months after Profound's $96 million Series C. Existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons also participated. TechCrunch independently reported the financing and valuation. Profound says the new capital will support product development and applied AI research as it expands its platform for marketing teams. The company reports that it now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Comcast, Walmart, The Estée Lauder Companies, Zoom, ServiceNow, Figma and MongoDB, and says more than one-third of the Fortune 100 use its platform. The company's evolution reflects a broader change in AI marketing software. Profound initially focused on helping businesses understand how consumers discover brands through AI search systems. It is now positioning AI Marketer as an agent orchestrator that can interpret those insights and perform marketing tasks. AI Marketer analyzes brand data and AI-generated answers, identifies opportunities and can deploy specialized sub-agents to execute work. Profound says the system can support activities ranging from competitive research and content refreshes to earned-media discovery, paid advertising analysis and campaign optimization. A related product, Context Manager, is designed to provide AI Marketer with persistent organizational context. It synthesizes information from knowledge-base files, meeting transcripts and communication threads so that the agent can incorporate a company's positioning and working practices into its outputs. That context layer is significant because enterprise marketing work rarely depends on isolated prompts. Campaign decisions typically require knowledge of positioning, products, competitors, target audiences, previous decisions and brand guidelines. Profound is also connecting organic AI-search optimization with paid media through Ads Studio. The company says marketers can create and manage AI-search advertising campaigns, make campaign-wide edits, analyze performance and optimize bidding across OpenAI, Google and Meta advertising environments. The strategy reflects an emerging view of AI search as a marketing channel rather than simply an analytics problem. As consumers use systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for product discovery, brands have to consider how their information is represented across a wider collection of third-party sources. That creates a substantially larger operational workload. Product pages, reviews, editorial coverage, social content, documentation and other sources can all influence how an AI system constructs an answer about a company. Profound's response is to combine visibility measurement with agents capable of acting on the resulting intelligence. The timing aligns with broader industry research. Gartner reported in May 2026 that marketing leaders expect AI-driven automation of marketing work to increase from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028. Gartner also found that only 30% of surveyed CMOs considered their organizations mature or fully developed in AI readiness. The challenge, therefore, is moving from AI experimentation to repeatable workflows. Profound is betting that specialized agents, persistent context and proprietary marketing data can provide that bridge. The company also plans to use the new funding to expand its applied AI research teams in New York and San Francisco. Its research program will evaluate how frontier models perform on complex marketing assignments and develop benchmarks for capabilities such as business understanding, market-signal analysis and cross-functional marketing execution. Market landscape. Marketing software is moving from AI-assisted features toward agentic workflows. Gartner's 2026 research identifies agentic AI as an emerging area where marketing organizations are attempting to move beyond pilots and connect AI investments to measurable business outcomes. Profound sits at the intersection of answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, marketing intelligence and AI agents. The competitive landscape includes platforms focused on AI-search visibility as well as broader marketing suites adding AI assistants and agents. The distinction is increasingly about what happens after an insight is generated. Visibility reporting can identify a problem; agentic software attempts to turn that finding into research, content, advertising or optimization work. Strategic outlook. Profound's funding round signals continued investor interest in software designed around the emerging AI-mediated discovery environment. The company's expansion from analytics into execution also reflects a wider change in marketing technology architecture. Instead of adding another dashboard to an existing stack, agentic platforms are attempting to become an operational layer that coordinates multiple tasks across existing systems. That model raises practical questions around brand governance, accuracy, permissions and measurement. Marketing teams will need to determine which activities agents can execute independently, which require human review and how the resulting work should be evaluated. Profound's research investment suggests that model capability and evaluation will become part of that equation. As marketing agents take on more complex assignments, the quality of the underlying context and the ability to measure outputs could become as important as raw model intelligence. Top insights. * Profound's $180 million Series D values the company at $1.8 billion as it expands from AI-search analytics into broader agentic marketing workflows. * AI Marketer is designed to interpret brand intelligence and deploy specialized agents across research, content, competitive analysis, advertising and campaign optimization. * Context Manager gives Profound's marketing agent persistent organizational information from knowledge bases, meetings and communications to support more contextual work. * Ads Studio connects organic AI-search strategy with paid campaigns across OpenAI, Google and Meta, bringing two increasingly connected discovery channels together. * Gartner expects AI-driven automation of marketing work to more than double from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028.

AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation, raises $180M Series D 7 months after last round. Profound, which builds marketing software to help brands appear in AI search results, on Tuesday said it has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, less than seven months after it raised a $96 million Series C. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins led the round, and existing investors - including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and South Park Commons - also participated. Launched two years ago, Profound started as an analytics platform, and has since expanded to help companies research and create marketing strategies. The startup helps businesses understand how AI helps consumers discover their brands. It's part of a wave of startups in the GEO/AEO space (generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization, respectively), where companies try to find ways to surface their products in the AI systems customers are increasingly using for search. The company says its revenue has increased by 3x in the past six months, and it now has more than 1,000 enterprise customers, which include Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, and Walmart. October 13 - 15 San Francisco Last day to book an exhibit table is September 18. Don't miss out on high-impact leads, investor access, and a brand spotlight in Disrupt's Expo Hall.

Profound raises $180M Series D at $1.8B valuation to build the AI platform for Marketing Teams. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-lead the round as Profound surpasses 1,000 enterprise brands including one third of the Fortune 100. September 15, 2026 09:00 ET | Source: Profound NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Profound today announced it has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons all participated. The round arrives less than seven months after Profound's $96 million Series C and follows a period of rapid growth for the company. The new funding will expand Profound's capabilities and support further research into how AI can transform the industry of marketing. Rapid Enterprise Growth and Traction "Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose built AI to help them do the work," said James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO of Profound. "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, helping ambitious teams take on the campaigns and ideas they haven't had the capacity or technology to pursue." Profound now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands. Its customers include Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, Royal Bank of Canada alongside technology companies such as Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma. The platform currently serves over one third of the Fortune 100. The Opportunity: Marketing in the Era of the Agentic Web As buyers turn to Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to research products and compare brands, marketers have infinitely more surface areas to cover. Answer Engines will use hundreds of thousands of sources to form its opinion of just one brand. This means your marketing must cover thousands of product pages, documentation, review sites, earned media, social, industry coverage, and so much more. This shift requires brands to produce an inhuman amount of marketing and keep it up to date across a growing range of sources on the agentic web. Profound's AI Search insights and agentic workbench helps teams turn insights into high quality marketing that wins attention at scale. "As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows," said Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. "Profound started with AI Search and is now expanding into a much broader platform for how modern marketing teams operate. James, Dylan, and the team have paired deep domain expertise with real technical rigor, and we're excited to continue backing them as they build the AI platform for the agentic web." Product Evolution: AI Marketer and Context Manager Profound is doubling down on developing their AI Marketer, a superintelligent teammate that does the work alongside marketing teams. * AI Marketer: Profound's AI Marketer is a marketing expert (agent) that scans your brand's data, analyzes AI answers, surfaces critical opportunities, and deploys sub-agents to do the work. * Context Manager: Profound Context Manager powers the AI Marketer, serving as a living synthesis of brand context and individual working style. It distills company knowledge base files, meeting transcripts, and communication threads, so as the brand's positioning evolves, the AI Marketer adjusts accordingly. Developers no longer handwrite every line of code. They use judgment and taste to orchestrate a fleet of Agents, redefining what an individual is capable of. Marketers now have that power with AI Marketer. Building for Every Marketing Function AI Marketer is designed to improve collaboration and speed across the entire marketing org, not just AEO teams. AI Marketer finds earned media opportunities, proactively refreshes stale content, conducts competitive analysis, analyzes paid ads performance, and even launches new ads. AI Marketer leverages Profound's latest product, Ads Studio, to help marketers build, launch, and manage AI Search campaigns without leaving Profound. Their AI Marketer does the work alongside them: creating ads at scale for rapid testing, applying batch edits across an entire campaign in one pass, and running root cause analysis or optimizing bidding strategies. All of it can be tracked using Profound's own pixel and works across OpenAI, Google, and Meta's ad managers. "This feels like a cheat code. We can launch creative in minutes. A must for AI Search ads," said William Yen, Head of Strategic Growth Initiatives at Ramp. For Profound, paid marketing is the natural extension of organic. The two move together, and where organic visibility runs thin, teams can subsidize that gap with paid ads to hold their presence in AI Search. Ads Studio brings both under one roof, backed by the same data that already drives your organic strategy. Investing in AI Research for Marketing Teams Profound will use its Series D investment to expand its applied AI lab in New York City and San Francisco. The growing team will study how frontier models perform on marketing work, evaluate their capabilities, and post-train models specifically for marketing. "Marketing is one of the hardest domains for AI to support because success depends on judgment, not just whether an answer is objectively right," said Ali Vaghar, Head of Data at Profound. "We're building the technical rigor and first evaluation approach needed to make AI genuinely useful for marketers." The Applied AI Research Team includes research scientists, International Science Olympiad medalists in physics and informatics, and economists. It is developing a benchmark to test how far AI can go in complex marketing assignments. It will evaluate whether models can understand a business, weigh competing market signals, and produce high-quality work across marketing functions. This research will inform improvements to Profound's AI Marketer, helping it handle more complex work across the marketing team. "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," said Anas Biad, Partner at Sequoia Capital. "By assembling exceptional engineering and research talent across San Francisco and New York, they're solving the deep technical challenges required to win in the AI era. The speed of enterprise adoption speaks for itself." For the last 20 years, top technical talent haven't prioritized building technology that helps marketers do the work. By combining deep domain expertise in marketing with state-of-the-art technical talent, Profound is building the AI platform powering thousands of marketing teams around the world. About Profound Profound is the fastest growing AI marketing platform used by 16% of the Fortune 500 like Comcast, Walmart and U.S. Bank, and innovators like Zoom, Ramp, and MongoDB. It's the workbench where marketers research, write, report, and collaborate with Profound's AI Marketer to get their brand chosen by the Answer Engines consumers increasingly rely on. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound shows what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer proactively pairs that data with your business context to surface opportunities, deploy Agents, and measure the impact to improve with every use. Learn more at tryprofound.com. Media Contact Layla Baradaran