Profound lands $180M to help brands compete in AI-powered search

Profound, the marketing technology firm officially registered as Cooper Square Technologies Inc., has secured $180 million in Series D funding, valuing the company at $1.8 billion. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons.

The startup's cloud platform tackles a growing challenge for marketers: ensuring their brands surface in responses from AI services like ChatGPT. Profound identifies the specific questions and prompts that consumers use when researching products, then helps companies adjust their content strategy to appear more frequently in chatbot answers.

Consider an electronics retailer selling smartwatches. Profound can reveal which ChatGPT queries shoppers commonly ask about the product category, highlight trending prompts from the past week, and spot patterns—such as the observation that health tracking features dominate smartwatch-related searches. Armed with this insight, the retailer can refine its website content to match what AI systems are likely to cite when answering those questions.

Beyond visibility tracking, the platform handles several adjacent marketing functions. It verifies whether AI responses accurately describe a company's products, gauges customer sentiment toward different offerings to surface problem areas, and identifies which prompts cause AI tools to mention competitors. In June, Profound introduced a feature for comparing how a brand's chatbot advertisements perform against rival campaigns.

Profound draws its prompt data from consumer panels—groups of users who voluntarily share their AI queries with market researchers through a double opt-in process. The company also filters out prompts containing personal information to protect privacy.

The platform has moved beyond pure analytics into automation. Earlier this year, Profound released a feature called Aim that autonomously designs AI visibility campaigns. The company also launched a tool capable of automatically creating chatbot advertisements.

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.

James Cadwallader, Profound co-founder and Chief Executive

The company plans to deploy the new capital toward customizing AI models specifically for marketing applications and establishing benchmarks to measure how effectively those models handle marketing tasks. Profound expects this research effort to yield technologies that will strengthen its platform's overall functionality.