Brands are spending real money to turn up inside chatbot answers, and investors just repriced the category.
Profound closed a $180M Series D on September 15 that values the company at $1.8B. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led, with Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons returning. The prior round, a $96M Series C, closed less than seven months earlier.
The product started as measurement. Two years ago Profound sold analytics that showed marketers how AI systems characterized their brands. It now runs the work itself, through agents sold under the name AI Marketer that research, draft and report alongside a marketing team.
Adoption numbers back the pitch. More than 1,000 enterprise brands are customers, among them Comcast, The Estee Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group and Royal Bank of Canada, plus technology buyers such as Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma. Profound says it touches over a third of the Fortune 100 and 16 percent of the Fortune 500, and that its platform draws on more than 2 billion real user prompts.
Chief executive James Cadwallader described the shift from understanding AI answers to producing the marketing that lands in them. Revenue, he said, tripled in six months.
