Profound is an 📝Artificial Intelligence (AI) search visibility platform that helps brands track and optimize how they are represented across answer engines such as 📝ChatGPT and 📝Perplexity.
The platform pioneered 📝Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — the practice of improving how brands surface inside generative AI answers rather than traditional ranked links. Profound tracks brand mentions, sentiment, and citation sources across 📝Large Language Models (LLMs), monitors AI crawler activity on a company's site, and supplies search-volume data for AI prompts so marketing teams can tune content to how models synthesize responses.
Profound was founded in 2024 by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, who met at South Park Commons, the San Francisco community and early-stage fund. The company works with more than 700 enterprise customers, including roughly 10 percent of the Fortune 500 — among them Target, Walmart, MongoDB, Ramp, and Figma.
Profound has raised approximately $155 million in venture funding, a trajectory that mirrors investor conviction that AI answers are displacing traditional search. Its $96 million Series C, announced in February 2026 and led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins participating, valued the company at $1 billion. Profound positions itself as the marketing platform for the AI era, aiming to become the system of record for brand visibility as generative engines mediate a growing share of discovery.