Profound has raised $180M in Series D funding at a $1.8B valuation, led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons.
Marketing is one of the most fundamental activities in business: you make something, then you have to make people care about it. AI is on the verge of transforming that second part entirely.
Profound has the opportunity to be the company that brings AI to marketing and, in doing so, redefine one of the world's largest and most interesting industries.
This Series D funding gives us the fuel to pursue that ambition.
AI is your new customer
Two years ago, we started Profound with a prediction: people would move away from blue links and ask AI for the answer instead. That prediction of course became true, and every CMO on the planet is now thinking about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
AEO rhymes with SEO, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. AI’s perception of your brand, much like a human's, is shaped by all of your marketing. The difference is AI goes far deeper than any human would. It scans 350,000 sources to judge your brand rather than reading a few listicles. Your dotcom, your PR, your social, your reviews, your retailer pages, your affiliates.
To avoid irrelevance in this new version of the internet, you will need to do a new kind of marketing, and way more of it.
Infinite marketing
Agents want different things from the web than people do. They want content that is current, boringly specific, and reasoned from first principles. ChatGPT has never tried on the sneaker, so it wants the weight of the shoe, the material and how it fares for high arches versus low arches. Platitudes like "the most stylish" are ignored entirely.
They also want far more of it. To answer a single question, an agent pulls from hundreds of pages, soon thousands. On June 3 2026, Cloudflare reported that bot traffic had overtaken human traffic on the web for the first time in history.
For marketers, the volume of work required to stay relevant just went up by orders of magnitude, and the marketing itself has to change. The only way to survive as a brand is to build enough of it to satiate that demand, and the math only works if agents are doing most of the heavy lifting. Jevons paradox will hit marketing harder than anywhere: as AI makes work cheaper to produce, companies will simply do more of it. Which brings us to the topic of slop…
Slop is a choice
Once a CMO accepts that agents are going to do a lot of the work, the next question is how to make sure it's any good.
Candidly, most of the slop out there exists because somebody gave a model a one-line prompt, minimal context, and no steering. The same tools, in the hands of talented marketers, are producing rich, high-performing marketing that wasn't possible before.
Marketer A types, "write me a blog post" into a chat box. Marketer B plumbs in the sales calls, the product data, the brand voice, the competitive research, and the performance data, then steers the agent like an editor steers a writer. Marketer B is winning by a country mile.
Context is the antidote to slop, and steering agents is a skill like any other. Across thousands of marketing teams, it is the single biggest predictor of who gets great work out of agents and who doesn't. AI won't solve marketing the way it is solving code, because nothing tells you a campaign “passed,” so a human will always be there to orchestrate, judge, and approve the work.
The gap between marketers who can build great work with agents and marketers who can't is already wide, and it widens every month. Your AI Marketer in Profound is how we close the gap.
Introducing AI Marketer (AKA Aim)
Your AI Marketer helps every member of your team work like Marketer B, with the company's context and judgment built in from day one.
Writing the thing used to take the time. Agents removed that constraint, and human supervision is now the scarcest resource in a marketing org, and a lot of it spent on plumbing, babysitting sub-agents, and re-explaining brand voice, rules and governance. Aim takes that off the marketer's plate.
It works in the background across all of your data, much like a good analyst. It notices what’s going well, what isn’t, and comes to you with a plan. Approve it and Aim does the rest: the brief, a first draft in your voice, a review from whoever signs off, publication to your CMS, and a report a month later on what it moved.
There is no standard version of Aim. Every instance is built from two layers of context held in Profound Context Manager (org level and individual level context), so a brand manager in Switzerland and the CMO at HQ get different output from the same platform.
Ask any CMO what AI looks like inside their org right now and you hear a similar story; every team is working with a different intelligence and a different version of the brand. Nothing pushes to or pulls from a shared source, so your marketers fight stale context. And leadership has no way to see the work, govern it, or know what it costs.
Profound sits at the application layer, above the models. Everyone works from one shared context, which creates a flywheel. The CMO can see, govern and meter everything being produced. The intelligence underneath is interchangeable: three weeks ago everyone wanted to build with Fable, today they want Astra, and next month it will be something else. Profound lets marketers surf the wave of frontier intelligence while protecting and compounding their proprietary data.
Where we are and where we're going
We are long the application layer. Our bet is that this platform shift produces giant vertical applications, ten times bigger than the ones the cloud produced, because for the first time the software can do the work itself rather than organizing the work for humans to do. What Salesforce did for the sales org in the cloud era, we intend to do for marketing in the generative era.
Our ambition is to build the canonical AI platform for marketing with a teammate that every marketer on the planet uses to do a totally new type of work. Today, more than 2,500 brands, a third of the Fortune 100, and the biggest agencies in the world do their marketing on Profound. From Estee Lauder, Walmart, Zoom, and Royal Bank of Canada to Stripe, Ramp, Cursor and Figma, teams are leveraging Aim to work at a pace that was previously impossible.The adoption we're seeing inside these organizations is unlike anything we've seen in enterprise software.
Aim is the first product we've built on these beliefs. Join us on September 30 for a live look at what it can already do.
To have two of the greatest venture firms in the world triple down on that ambition is an honor. Thank you to Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, to our existing investors for continuing to support us, to our customers who push us every single day, and to the Profound team, who are the best people we have ever worked with.
We are committed to building frontier AI for marketers, and we're hiring across every team. If this excites you, get in touch.
James Cadwallader
Co-founder & CEO
