NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Profound today announced it has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons all participated.
The round arrives less than seven months after Profound’s $96 million Series C and follows a period of rapid growth for the company. The new funding will expand Profound’s capabilities and support further research into how AI can transform the industry of marketing.
Rapid Enterprise Growth and Traction
“Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose built AI to help them do the work,” said James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO of Profound. “Profound started as an analytics platform for marketers to understand how buyers discover their brands through AI. Today, they’re using our Agents to research, write, and report. Now, we’re delivering AI Marketer as an Agent orchestrator that works alongside every function of your marketing team, helping ambitious teams take on the campaigns and ideas they haven’t had the capacity or technology to pursue.”
Profound now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands. Its customers include Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, Royal Bank of Canada alongside technology companies such as Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma. The platform currently serves over one third of the Fortune 100.
The Opportunity: Marketing in the Era of the Agentic Web
As buyers turn to Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to research products and compare brands, marketers have infinitely more surface areas to cover. Answer Engines will use hundreds of thousands of sources to form its opinion of just one brand.
This means your marketing must cover thousands of product pages, documentation, review sites, earned media, social, industry coverage, and so much more.
This shift requires brands to produce an inhuman amount of marketing and keep it up to date across a growing range of sources on the agentic web. Profound’s AI Search insights and agentic workbench helps teams turn insights into high quality marketing that wins attention at scale.
“As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows,” said Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “Profound started with AI Search and is now expanding into a much broader platform for how modern marketing teams operate. James, Dylan, and the team have paired deep domain expertise with real technical rigor, and we’re excited to continue backing them as they build the AI platform for the agentic web.”
Product Evolution: AI Marketer and Context Manager
Profound is doubling down on developing their AI Marketer, a superintelligent teammate that does the work alongside marketing teams.
- AI Marketer: Profound’s AI Marketer is a marketing expert (agent) that scans your brand’s data, analyzes AI answers, surfaces critical opportunities, and deploys sub-agents to do the work.
- Context Manager: Profound Context Manager powers the AI Marketer, serving as a living synthesis of brand context and individual working style. It distills company knowledge base files, meeting transcripts, and communication threads, so as the brand’s positioning evolves, the AI Marketer adjusts accordingly.
Developers no longer handwrite every line of code. They use judgment and taste to orchestrate a fleet of Agents, redefining what an individual is capable of. Marketers now have that power with AI Marketer.
Building for Every Marketing Function
AI Marketer is designed to improve collaboration and speed across the entire marketing org, not just AEO teams. AI Marketer finds earned media opportunities, proactively refreshes stale content, conducts competitive analysis, analyzes paid ads performance, and even launches new ads.
AI Marketer leverages Profound’s latest product, Ads Studio, to help marketers build, launch, and manage AI Search campaigns without leaving Profound. Their AI Marketer does the work alongside them: creating ads at scale for rapid testing, applying batch edits across an entire campaign in one pass, and running root cause analysis or optimizing bidding strategies. All of it can be tracked using Profound’s own pixel and works across OpenAI, Google, and Meta’s ad managers.
“This feels like a cheat code. We can launch creative in minutes. A must for AI Search ads,” said William Yen, Head of Strategic Growth Initiatives at Ramp.
For Profound, paid marketing is the natural extension of organic. The two move together, and where organic visibility runs thin, teams can subsidize that gap with paid ads to hold their presence in AI Search. Ads Studio brings both under one roof, backed by the same data that already drives your organic strategy.
Investing in AI Research for Marketing Teams
Profound will use its Series D investment to expand its applied AI lab in New York City and San Francisco. The growing team will study how frontier models perform on marketing work, evaluate their capabilities, and post-train models specifically for marketing.
“Marketing is one of the hardest domains for AI to support because success depends on judgment, not just whether an answer is objectively right,” said Ali Vaghar, Head of Data at Profound. “We’re building the technical rigor and first evaluation approach needed to make AI genuinely useful for marketers.”
The Applied AI Research Team includes research scientists, International Science Olympiad medalists in physics and informatics, and economists. It is developing a benchmark to test how far AI can go in complex marketing assignments. It will evaluate whether models can understand a business, weigh competing market signals, and produce high-quality work across marketing functions. This research will inform improvements to Profound’s AI Marketer, helping it handle more complex work across the marketing team.
"The world's largest brands are moving fast to put AI to work across their marketing teams, and Profound has established itself as the applied AI lab they rely on," said Anas Biad, Partner at Sequoia Capital. "By assembling exceptional engineering and research talent across San Francisco and New York, they're solving the deep technical challenges required to win in the AI era. The speed of enterprise adoption speaks for itself."
For the last 20 years, top technical talent haven't prioritized building technology that helps marketers do the work. By combining deep domain expertise in marketing with state-of-the-art technical talent, Profound is building the AI platform powering thousands of marketing teams around the world.
About Profound
Profound is the fastest growing AI marketing platform used by 16% of the Fortune 500 like Comcast, Walmart and U.S. Bank, and innovators like Zoom, Ramp, and MongoDB. It's the workbench where marketers research, write, report, and collaborate with Profound’s AI Marketer to get their brand chosen by the Answer Engines consumers increasingly rely on. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound shows what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer proactively pairs that data with your business context to surface opportunities, deploy Agents, and measure the impact to improve with every use. Learn more at tryprofound.com.
Media Contact
Layla Baradaran
