P

Profound

AI answer-engine visibility analytics for brands

Global Payroll Manager

Full-Time
$150k - $240k/yr+ Equity
Senior, Expert
San Francisco, CA, USA+1 moreMore locations: New York, NY, USA
In PersonOn-site in either the New York City or San Francisco office.
AccountingPayroll Accounting

About the job

Requirements
  • 5 to 8+ years of payroll experience, including multi-country payroll.
  • Hands-on experience running US payroll across multiple states and managing payroll in more than one country; US and multi-country experience are must-haves.
  • Experience working with an Employer of Record or Professional Employer Organization to cover countries without a local entity.
  • Deep knowledge of payroll tax and compliance.
  • Familiarity with equity compensation mechanics, including incentive stock options, non-qualified stock options, restricted stock units, withholding, and reporting, and cap table tools such as Carta.
  • Experience with commission and variable pay structures.
  • A track record partnering cross-functionally with Sales Operations and Revenue Operations teams to administer commissions accurately and on schedule.
  • Solid accounting fundamentals, including journal entries, accruals, and reconciliations, and comfort closing out one's own work.
  • Close working partnership with People teams, expertise in human resources information system tooling, and familiarity with Rippling payroll is a plus.
  • Practical AI fluency, including experience using AI assistants or automation tools to reduce manual effort and improve accuracy.
  • Sound judgment on data privacy and security when handling sensitive employee information, including with AI tools.
  • Attention to detail and judgment to know when to escalate.
  • Ability to communicate payroll clearly to non-experts across time zones.
  • Ability to work in ambiguity and build structure, processes, and tools where none exist yet.
Responsibilities
  • Run end-to-end payroll for the US, UK, Singapore, and Argentina, including new hires, terminations, salary changes, bonuses, commissions, and other variable pay.
  • Administer deductions and benefit contributions, including 401(k) remittances, garnishments, and pension contributions, working with benefits and retirement providers.
  • Manage contractor payments and keep worker classification documented with People and Legal.
  • Respond to employee questions on pay, deductions, taxes, and benefits, and protect the confidentiality of payroll data.
  • Maintain compliance with local tax, wage and hour, social security, pension, and statutory requirements in every jurisdiction, including registrations, filings such as Form 941, year-end reporting, and responses to tax authority notices.
  • Handle payroll tax for mobile and remote employees across US states and countries.
  • Manage the Employer of Record partner for Spain and Germany by validating inputs, reviewing outputs and invoices, and coordinating onboarding, offboarding, and employee questions.
  • Own relationships with payroll providers, benefits administrators, and local tax and accounting advisors, and hold them to clear service levels.
  • Support equity compensation payroll processes, including withholding and reporting on exercises and vesting events, in coordination with Legal and Carta, plus UK Enterprise Management Incentive-related items.
  • Administer sales commissions and other variable pay with Sales Operations to ensure plans are paid accurately and on schedule.
  • Build and maintain payroll calendars, checklists, standard operating procedures, and internal controls, including approvals, segregation of duties, and audit trails.
  • Use AI and workflow automation for tasks such as pre-run variance and anomaly checks, input validation, reconciliations, standard operating procedure drafting, and triaging routine employee questions.
  • Evaluate AI-enabled payroll and human resources information system features and automation tools, and recommend what to adopt based on accuracy, cost, and risk.
  • Set clear rules for where AI output needs human review and how sensitive employee data is protected when AI tools are used.
  • Lead the payroll side of expansion into new countries, from registrations and provider selection to first-run readiness.
Desired Qualifications
  • Singapore- or Argentina-specific payroll experience.
  • Experience at a high-growth startup.
  • Experience standing up payroll in a new country.
  • Experience supporting payroll and equity audits.
  • Experience with cross-border mobility and shadow payroll.

About the company

P

Profound

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Website

Profound helps brands understand and optimize their presence in AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Its platform analyzes AI-generated results to show where a brand appears, how often competitors show up, and how content influences AI recommendations, then provides workflows for research and marketing-strategy planning. Profound differentiates itself by focusing on enterprise AEO/GEO visibility, backed by a large customer base and rapid growth, with support from major investors. The goal is to help brands own their visibility in AI answers and guide content and marketing decisions to improve how products are shown in AI-generated responses.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Series D

Total Funding

$334.5M

Headquarters

New York City, New York

Founded

2024

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Profound raised $180 million on September 15, 2026 at a $1.8 billion valuation.
  • Revenue tripled over six months before the Series D, signaling accelerating enterprise demand.
  • More than one-third of Fortune 100 companies use Profound, expanding land-and-expand potential.

What critics are saying

  • Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity can commoditize visibility tracking inside their own products.
  • Adobe, Semrush, and enterprise martech suites can copy Profound's dashboards and agent workflows.
  • If answer-engine traffic slows, Profound's core category loses budget priority within twelve months.

What makes Profound unique

  • September 2026, Profound bundled AEO analytics, AI agents, and paid media workflows.
  • Estée Lauder partnered with Profound on September 14, 2026 across its global beauty portfolio.
  • Profound serves 1,000-plus enterprises, including Comcast, Walmart, Zoom, ServiceNow, and Figma.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • 401(k) Retirement Plan
  • 401(k) Company Match
  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • Life Insurance
  • Disability Insurance
  • Unlimited Paid Time Off
  • Flexible Work Hours
  • Remote Work Options
  • Paid Vacation
  • Paid Holidays

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

12%

1 year growth

5%

2 year growth

23%
e27
Oct 16th, 2026
What does ChatGPT say about your brand? Miracly raises US$2M to find out.

What does ChatGPT say about your brand? Miracly raises US$2M to find out. Backed by BEENEXT and Lotus, The Wild Ventures enters a crowded AI search market dominated by billion-dollar rival Profound 16 Oct, 2026 For two decades, marketers obsessed over a single question: where do we rank on Google? A growing number now ask a stranger one: what does ChatGPT say about us when we are not in the room? The Wild Ventures, the Swedish-founded company behind home decor brand Wild Palace, is betting that question will turn into a budget line. On October 14, it launched Miracly, an AI marketing platform, after raising a US$2 million pre-seed round. The round was led by Singapore-based BEENEXT and Lotus, with participation from a Swedish family office. Existing backers include Stefan Lindeberg, founder of Nordic VC firm Creandum, and Alex Bouaziz, co-founder and CEO of payroll and HR unicorn Deel. The company did not disclose a valuation. From wallpaper to software. The launch marks a notable turn for a company that, until recently, described itself as a house of brands. When The Wild Ventures announced itself in April 2025, it closed a US$750,000 angel round at a post-money valuation of around US$7 million. The plan then was to use AI and sharp branding to shake up "stale but big" categories such as wallpaper, pet accessories and paper packaging, through brands including Wild Palace, Poositive Pets and Future Paper. Miracly is a different animal. It is business software, sold to marketing teams rather than to shoppers. The founding team helps explain the pivot, or at least the extension. Co-founders Arvid Lithander and Shannon Cullum come from advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden+Kennedy and MullenLowe, and are joined by Bjorn Bergstrom and Malin Renström. People who have spent careers fighting for share of voice tend to notice early when the arena moves. The obvious sceptic's question is whether a startup can build consumer brands and an enterprise software product at the same time on a pre-seed budget. The generous reading is that Wild Palace doubles as Miracly's test lab: a live brand on which to try out AI visibility tactics before selling them to others. The company will need to show which reading is closer to the truth. What Miracly actually does. Miracly said its software helps marketing teams track how brands appear on AI platforms and manage work across channels. In plain terms, it watches how chatbots and AI assistants describe and recommend a brand, then helps the team act on what it finds. That second half matters. Monitoring alone is quickly becoming a commodity. The harder problem is turning "the chatbot thinks our rival is cheaper" into a coordinated response across a website, PR, social media and paid campaigns, without adding another tool to an already bloated. Early customers include Acclime, an Asia-focused corporate services firm, and Pixi Beauty. The pairing is telling: one sells complex professional services, where buyers increasingly ask AI tools to compare providers; the other sells skincare, where an AI-generated product recommendation can make or break a purchase. A crowded new channel. AI search is changing how brands are discovered online, handing marketers yet another channel to monitor and influence. When a user asks an assistant for the best accounting firm in Singapore or a moisturiser for humid weather, the answer usually arrives as a single synthesised reply rather than a page of links. A brand that is absent from that reply barely exists for that customer. It is why marketers have started asking what ChatGPT is saying behind their backs. For Southeast Asia, the stakes are arguably higher. Discovery in the region is fragmented across languages, super apps and social commerce, and most brands already juggle multiple channels on thin teams. Adding AI answer engines to that mix is not optional, but it is not cheap either. Miracly is far from alone. New York-based Profound is the category's heavyweight: it raised a US$96 million Series C at a US$1 billion valuation in February, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins participating, and serves more than 700 enterprise customers. Industry reports say it followed that with a US$180 million Series D at a US$1.8 billion valuation in September. Y Combinator-backed AthenaHQ, founded by former Google Search engineer Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, came out of stealth in 2025 with US$2.2 million in seed funding and pitches a cheaper, self-serve alternative. Against that backdrop, US$2 million is a modest war chest. Profound has already moved from tracking into agents that execute marketing tasks, which is precisely the "manage work across channels" territory Miracly is claiming. Competing on features with a company that had raised more than 75 times as much even before its latest round is a losing game. Miracly's better bet may be geography and price: mid-market brands and Asian firms that Silicon Valley's enterprise-first players are not prioritising. That may also be what BEENEXT, which has a long record of backing early-stage startups across Asia, sees in the deal. The question nobody has answered. There is a deeper uncertainty hanging over the whole category. Search engine optimisation worked because Google published rules, however vague, and the results could be measured. AI models are less predictable: answers shift with model updates, phrasing and even the user's location. Selling the ability to "influence" those answers requires proof that customers can repeat, not just a dashboard of anecdotes. And as AI platforms experiment with paid placements, the organic window that tools such as Miracly promise to optimise could narrow. If AI search becomes another pay-to-play channel, the winners may be ad buyers, not optimisers. For now, marketers are paying to find out what the machines think of them. As AI agents rewrite the growth marketing playbook, Miracly's challenge is to prove that knowing the answer is only half the job, and that it can deliver the other half. Editor, e27

MarTech Cube
Oct 13th, 2026
Foundation Marketing boosts Bitly's visibility in AI search.

Foundation Marketing boosts Bitly's visibility in AI search. Search. A Certified Partnership With Profound Helps Foundation Turn AI Visibility Investment Into Measurable Outcomes for Brands Foundation Marketing announced it has joined Profound's inaugural Agency Certification Cohort. Every Foundation engagement can now open with the same enterprise measurement that supported Bitly's continued growth as the most cited brand in its category. The certification recognizes agencies with proven expertise in measuring and improving how brands appear across generative AI platforms. Foundation is one of 18 agencies certified in the inaugural cohort. AI has become the first place many B2B buyers research vendors, build shortlists, and increasingly make purchasing decisions. A growing share of the sources those AI answers cite is community content, led by Reddit. Foundation's April 2026 analysis of 57.2 million citations across five major AI platforms found that Reddit was the largest external source cited for B2B SaaS brands, accounting for 20.8% of all external citations. Nearly one in three external sources AI cites when helping buyers discover B2B software now comes from Reddit (30.9% of citations on unbranded discovery queries). Foundation has already proven this approach on one of the web's most competitive AI search battlegrounds. Over a 12 month engagement, Foundation transformed Bitly's Reddit presence from a dormant branded subreddit with just 38 members into an owned content engine, shifting the program's primary KPI from referral traffic to AI citation share. Measured across 218 tracked prompts in Profound, Bitly now holds: * The number one citation share among link shorteners at 11.7%, nearly double the next competitor. * A 422% increase in Reddit referral sessions over the 12-month program, from 178 to 930. * Recognition from Reddit as an official success story on its business platform. * Eight branded subreddit threads cited directly in Google AI Overviews, four holding the number one position. The full case study is published at https://foundationinc.co/case-study/bitly That same measurement discipline is now part of Foundation's core offering. Foundation now offers every client a Profound powered baseline audit at the start of an engagement, showing where the brand stands in AI answers before any strategy is set. Foundation combines those insights with strategy and execution, measuring citation share, share of voice and sentiment across the AI platforms that matter most to each client's buyers. Results are tracked against the original baseline, with continuous monitoring identifying competitive shifts and emerging opportunities. This allows strategy and investment to be aligned with measurable outcomes. Foundation and Profound know each other's work because they've experienced it from both sides of the relationship. Since 2025, Profound has trusted Foundation to strengthen its own AI visibility, while Foundation has relied on Profound's technology to measure and optimize client performance. That is the confidence behind Foundation's place in the inaugural cohort: earned through real world results, shared experience and a partnership tested in practice. "Buyers now ask AI before they ever visit a website, and those answers are increasingly shaped by community conversations," said Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation Marketing. "Profound shows brands where they stand today. Our job is to improve where they stand tomorrow. Together, measurement and execution create accountability. Clients can see where they started, track progress over time and invest with confidence because every strategic decision is backed by data." "Foundation has demonstrated that AI visibility is measurable and improvable when the right strategy is paired with the right data," said Trevor Pyle, Head of Growth Marketing at Profound. "They've used Profound to help clients establish a baseline, identify opportunities and track meaningful progress over time. Their work with Bitly shows exactly what's possible when measurement and execution work together, which is why we're excited to welcome them as one of our inaugural certified agency partners."

StartupTalky
Oct 1st, 2026
Unveilr AI raises pre-seed from AJVC at ₹16.7 cr valuation.

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.

StrategINK
Sep 16th, 2026
Profound raises $180 million in Series D at $1.8 billion valuation.

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 -

WealthyBoss
Sep 16th, 2026
Profound hits $1.8B valuation as AI search marketing becomes essential infrastructure.

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.