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.
