According to Fortune, Profound, a New York City-based company, has secured $35 million in a Series B funding round, led by Sequoia Capital, to address the increasing shift in web search traffic towards AI-powered chatbots and assist brands in maintaining visibility within AI-generated responses.
This new funding round brings Profound’s total capital raised to $58.5 million. The investment also saw continued participation from existing venture capital firms including Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons. Profound states it was the first to enter this post-SEO market segment.
Profound launched less than a year ago and has since secured Fortune 10 clients along with hundreds of additional organizations. Publicly named clients include Ramp, U.S. Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, Docusign, and Chime. The company reports that approximately 2,000 marketers from over 500 organizations utilize its platform on a daily basis. This adoption rate coincides with a documented increase in AI-powered chatbot usage for search; the Wall Street Journal reported that AI-powered chatbots accounted for more than 5% of U.S. desktop search traffic, an increase from 1.3% in early 2024.
Sequoia partner Anas Biad indicated that the firm’s significant investment is predicated on the capabilities of Profound’s cofounders, James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs. Cadwallader, a serial marketing entrepreneur, and Babbs, a former software engineer at Uber, initially met at South Park Commons. South Park Commons, established in 2016, is a San Francisco-based community and early-stage fund founded by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s first female engineer, and Aditya Agarwal, former Dropbox CTO.
Sequoia perceives the emergence of AI search as a fundamental, “once-in-a-generation platform shift” for marketers. The firm believes Profound is positioned to lead this transition by enabling brands to monitor their visibility and that of their competitors within AI-generated results. Furthermore, Profound’s platform assists brands in producing new content designed to align with the evolving landscape of AI search. Biad commented on Profound’s operational efficiency, stating, “Their speed of execution was truly remarkable—in both the product they built and the customers they landed.” He added, “We only back founders who want to build generational companies. Their team is very ambitious and very aggressive.”
James Cadwallader, who previously founded the influencer marketing firm Kyra, characterized the current change as a “Game of Thrones power shift” that moves away from traditional search engine optimization tactics, which have been dominant for decades, towards a new paradigm of AI search. Cadwallader developed a particular interest in Perplexity in early 2024. He stated, “It was so obvious to me that this was an inflection point—once you’ve used AI to search, you quickly understand why our children won’t be using [Google’s] blue links.”
Cadwallader emphasized that this shift extends beyond search functionalities, positing that it will fundamentally alter the internet itself and become a critical concern at the boardroom level for every marketing department. If AI chatbots become the primary method for consumer search, brands risk losing direct visibility and control over their online presentation. He clarified that this is not exclusively a marketing concern but a broader business challenge impacting revenue generation, customer acquisition strategies, competitive positioning, and brand identity.
Addressing this challenge, according to Cadwallader, involves more than merely monitoring AI output. It necessitates the creation and optimization of content specifically for a new audience: the AI bots themselves. Cadwallader explained, “This is the first time ever you are creating content for bots.” He further elaborated that “Brands are using Profound to create what humans would probably find boring—highly structured content that’s designed for bots to consume, like a game of telephone.”
Profound’s platform tracks how major AI models surface brand mentions. This includes models such as ChatGPT, Grok, Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and DeepSeek. Cadwallader noted the dynamic nature of these models, stating, “We see huge differences across models, and that changes week over week or month over month.” He compared the process to “tracking a new species.”
The platform then utilizes advanced reasoning models, including OpenAI’s o3 and GPT-5, to analyze the collected insights. Based on this analysis, Profound generates recommendations, which range from gap analyses to suggested copy. These recommendations may involve developing new content, optimizing existing web pages, producing social media posts, or targeting specific media outlets that influence AI-generated responses. Cadwallader clarified the role of human involvement, stating, “There will always be a human in the loop—it’s not about replacing marketers.” He added, “But what used to take a team of 10, you can now do entirely within Profound.”
Cadwallader also highlighted the expanding scope of this challenge beyond traditional marketing. He stated, “It’s become a PR challenge, a content challenge, even a customer support challenge.” He attributed this expansion to the nature of AI models, explaining, “The models have opinions, and they reflect the internet’s opinions back to users.”
This broader scope positions Profound’s ambitions beyond conventional SEO. Cadwallader envisions a future where transactions occur directly within AI assistants, eliminating the need for external website clicks. He suggested this scenario poses competitive threats even to established giants like Amazon. Drawing inspiration from Salesforce, Cadwallader referenced its disruption of the cloud software industry in the early 2000s, stating, “It’s an example of just how big you can go.”
