Two years after our founding, Profound has been named No. 17 on LinkedIn’s Top Startups 2026 list in the U.S., published on October 14. The annual ranking recognizes 50 emerging companies that are growing, attracting attention, and recruiting top talent.
For us, this is a chance to recognize the people building Profound and the customers who have helped shape what we build.
How LinkedIn selects its Top Startups
Now in its tenth year, LinkedIn’s ranking draws on platform data across four areas: employment growth, engagement with companies and their employees, interest in job opportunities, and the ability to attract talent from LinkedIn Top Companies.
The 2026 ranking evaluates activity from July 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026. It captures how companies are growing and where professionals are choosing to take the next step in their careers.
Building the AI platform for marketing
Profound was founded in 2024 to help marketers understand how their brands show up in AI answers. That work started with giving teams visibility into what Answer Engines say about them, which sources those answers cite, and how they compare with competitors.
Today, marketers use Profound to research, write, report, and act on what they learn. Our AI Marketer brings together a brand’s data and business context to identify opportunities and put Agents to work, from researching competitors to refreshing content. We’re backed by investors including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
More than 1,000 enterprise brands use Profound, including Walmart, The Estée Lauder Companies, Zoom, Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. Their questions and feedback help us understand where marketing teams need better information and where they need help doing the work itself.
We care about how that work gets done, too. Our core values emphasize clear, egoless communication, fractal speed, and obsessive craftsmanship. That means sharing context, making decisions, and caring about the details of what we put in customers’ hands.
Being included on this year’s list is a welcome chance to pause and say thank you. To our team, thank you for the care and effort you put into building Profound. To our customers, thank you for trusting us with your work and pushing us to make the product better.
There is plenty left to build, and we’re hiring across engineering, research and data, design, marketing, and customer-facing roles.
If these are the kinds of problems you want to work on, explore our open roles.
