Partnering with Profound: Winning on the AI Stage
Sequoia by Anas Biad and Alfred Lin
People are asking AI assistants what to buy and trust now. Sequoia says Profound helps brands show up inside those answers, not just on search results.
Based on reporting by Sequoia, by Anas Biad and Alfred Lin — read the original for the full story.
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People are starting their product and brand research in AI assistants instead of old-school search, and Sequoia thinks that shift changes the rules. The source of truth is no longer a page of blue links. It’s a single generated answer, and that answer depends on what the model seems to know about a brand.
That matters because the old SEO playbook was built around traffic, backlinks and clicks. AI assistants don’t work that way. They produce one probabilistic response, which means companies need a different way to measure whether they’re showing up at all, and whether they’re showing up well.
Profound is aiming straight at that problem. Its platform shows companies how they appear across AI assistants, helps them create content to improve visibility, and adds AI marketing agents so one marketer can do work that would normally take an agency. In other words: monitor the answer, shape the answer, then push the campaign through.
The company is moving quickly. Sequoia says it launched less than a year ago, has rolled out a broad set of products, and has traction across major sectors. Its customer list includes Fortune 10 companies, Ramp, U.S. Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign, Chime, Clay and Plaid.
There’s also a concrete number behind the pitch. Ramp said it saw a 7x increase in AI brand visibility for its accounts payable product. That’s the kind of result investors love to put in bold, because it turns a fuzzy new category into something that looks measurable. Sequoia is backing Profound’s Series B and betting that every company will need this sort of tooling as search keeps drifting toward direct AI answers.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The fun part here is that marketing is becoming more like systems engineering, which will either horrify CMOs or finally give them something honest to measure. Profound’s pitch is smart because it accepts the ugly truth: if AI is answering for the internet, brands will obsess over the answer like they once obsessed over page one. That’s not a bug in the new era; it’s the whole business model.
Read more about this at: Sequoia
