Profound, an AI marketing startup that helps brands track and improve how they appear in AI chatbot answers, has raised $180 million in a Series D funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation.

Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons, Profound said Tuesday.

The funding comes less than seven months after Profound raised a $96 million Series C round in February at a $1 billion valuation. Its valuation has now increased 80% since that round. Total funding now exceeds $335 million.

What is Profound?

Founded in 2024, Profound initially helped marketers track how AI models mentioned and described their brands. It has since added AI agents that can use those findings to carry out marketing tasks.

"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," said James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound. "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 said its AI Marketer reviews brand data and AI answers, finds opportunities, and uses other AI agents to do the work. Another tool, Context Manager, supports AI Marketer by using company files, meeting transcripts and messages to understand the business and keep its work consistent with the brand.

Profound says it now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including over a third of the Fortune 100. Customers include Walmart, Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, Ramp and Figma.

The startup told Bloomberg that sales have tripled since its February funding round, but did not share revenue figures. Its headcount has also reportedly grown from about 90 at the start of the year to nearly 400.

Profound appears to be benefiting from changes in how people search for products online. As more people use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to research products, brands want to know what these AI tools say about them and whether they recommend them. SEO helps companies appear higher in search results, while answer engine optimization, or AEO, focuses on how they appear in AI answers.

Funding AI research and advertising tools

Profound said it will use the funding to grow its AI research team in New York City and San Francisco. The team will test how well leading AI models can do marketing work and train them further for these tasks.

"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, Profound's head of data. "We're building the technical rigor and first evaluation approach needed to make AI genuinely useful for marketers."

Profound said it is creating a benchmark to test how well AI models understand businesses and do marketing tasks. Profound said this will help AI Marketer do more work.

The startup is also expanding into advertising. Its Ads Studio lets marketers create and manage ads on OpenAI, Google and Meta.