Profound Raises $180M Series D at $1.8B Valuation
Quick Reads
- Profound raised $180 million in Series D funding, valuing the AI marketing startup at $1.8 billion.
- Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, less than seven months after Profound’s $96 million Series C.
- The company is building new “AI Marketer” and “Context Manager” products while expanding its applied AI research team.
Profound, the AI platform for marketers, has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
The round lands less than seven months after Profound’s $96 million Series C, nearly doubling the New York startup’s valuation and pushing its total funding past $335 million since its 2024 founding.
Existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons all returned, according to a company announcement.
Profound built its name helping brands track how they’re mentioned when consumers search through AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini instead of Google.
The company now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Comcast, Walmart, and The Estée Lauder Companies, covering over a third of the Fortune 100 and 16% of the Fortune 500, per Bloomberg.
The Fresh Capital Funds Two New Products
An “AI Marketer” that investigates brand data and executes marketing tasks, and a “Context Manager” that synthesizes meetings, emails, and brand assets to keep that AI teammate current. Co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader said customers are already using Profound’s agents to research, write, and report, not just analyze.
Profound is also expanding its applied AI research team, recruiting scientists, engineers, and International Olympiad in Informatics medalists to post-train models for marketing workflows and build what it calls the industry’s first benchmark for real-world marketing tasks.
AI labs have poured resources into coding, law, and finance, but marketing, a trillion-dollar function, has lagged. Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman called marketing ripe for a platform rebuild around agentic workflows.
The raise underscores how fast AI-native marketing tools are scaling, even as Salesforce and Adobe still dominate enterprise marketing software. Profound has not disclosed revenue figures, leaving investors betting on category growth over proven financial performance.
