Profound, an 18-month-old startup betting that the future of marketing will be shaped not by Google links but by AI answers, is now a unicorn.
The company has raised its $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with continued participation by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic Capital, Saga VC, and South Park Commons, Fortune has learned. The round brings total funding to $155 million and follows its Series B, which Fortune previously reported as one of the more aggressive early bets on “answer‑engine optimization” in the generative AI era.
For decades, marketers have fought to climb search rankings. Those days are fading fast, Profound CEO and cofounder James Cadwallader told Fortune. Profound, he says, is reshaping how we experience “search”by helping brands measure, and ultimately influence, what systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about them.
“In the future, every company on the planet will care deeply about how AI talks about and surfaces—and at some point interacts with—their brand,” Cadwallader said. “As long as marketing exists, Profound has a place.”
Profound’s software tracks how AI models describe and recommend brands across millions of real prompts. It can show customers not just whether they appear in AI answers, but why and what competitors are doing differently.
