Profound hits $1.8B valuation with $180M raise led by Sequoia Capital to help brands rank in AI search

Profound has landed $180 million in fresh funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, almost doubling its price tag in seven months. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins led the Series D, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons all coming back for another round.

The New York startup now says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100. That matters because the company is built around a simple but awkward shift: buyers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what to buy, and those answers can shape what gets bought next.

Profound began as a way to measure that shift. Its dashboard tracks how often those models mention a brand, what context they use, and which competitors show up instead, using more than two billion real user prompts. But the company is pushing past measurement and into action. Its newer AI Marketer product scans a brand’s own data, spots where visibility is slipping, and sends sub-agents off to draft content, do competitive research and manage campaigns.

The latest funding also backs a bigger move in San Francisco: an applied-AI research operation aimed at understanding how frontier models handle marketing work. And through Ads Studio, Profound is now helping teams launch paid AI Search campaigns directly into OpenAI’s, Google’s and Meta’s ad managers. Ramp’s William Yen called it a “cheat code” for creative that can be launched in minutes.

This is where Profound is trying to separate itself from the answer-engine crowd. Peec AI and Bluefish are both chasing the same market, but Profound wants to be the operating system, not the dashboard. The company says revenue has tripled in the past six months, though that figure comes from Profound itself. The real test is whether brands will let a startup not only tell them what the models say, but act on it too.