Profound announced on September 15, 2026, that it has raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons. This investment follows a $96 million Series C less than seven months earlier and will expand the company's capabilities and applied AI research for marketing.
Rapid Enterprise Adoption
Profound now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma. The platform currently supports over one third of the Fortune 100, reflecting significant traction among large organizations. Co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader said customers have shown how much more marketing teams can accomplish when they have purpose-built AI to help them do the work.
Marketing in the Agentic Web Era
As buyers increasingly turn to answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to research products and compare brands, marketers face a growing number of surfaces to manage. These answer engines draw on hundreds of thousands of sources to form opinions about a single brand. Profound's AI Search insights and agentic workbench help teams convert those insights into high-quality marketing at scale.
Product Evolution: AI Marketer and Context Manager
The company is prioritizing the development of AI Marketer, an intelligent teammate that scans brand data, analyzes AI-generated answers, surfaces opportunities, and deploys sub-agents to complete work. Context Manager powers AI Marketer by maintaining a living synthesis of brand context and individual working style drawn from knowledge files, meeting transcripts, and communication threads. As positioning evolves, the AI Marketer adjusts accordingly, giving marketers the ability to orchestrate a fleet of agents rather than manually executing every task.
Supporting Every Marketing Function
Profound designed AI Marketer to improve collaboration and speed across the entire marketing organization. It identifies earned media opportunities, refreshes outdated content, conducts competitive analysis, evaluates paid advertising performance, and launches new ads. Through the new Ads Studio product, marketers can build, launch, and manage AI search campaigns while AI Marketer creates ads at scale, applies batch edits, and optimizes bidding strategies across OpenAI, Google, and Meta ad platforms.
Investor Confidence
Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman noted that marketing is being rebuilt around new workflows as AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery. Sequoia Capital partner Anas Biad said major brands are moving quickly to apply AI across marketing teams and view Profound as an applied AI lab they rely on. The funding will support expansion of Profound's applied AI lab in New York City and San Francisco.
Applied AI Research
The research team includes research scientists, International Science Olympiad medalists in physics and informatics, and economists who are developing a benchmark to evaluate how far AI can go in complex marketing assignments. Their work will assess whether models can understand a business, weigh competing market signals, and produce high-quality work across marketing functions. These insights will inform improvements to Profound's AI Marketer, helping it handle more complex work across the marketing team.
Profound positions itself as the fastest-growing AI marketing platform, used by 16 percent of the Fortune 500 and built on more than two billion real user prompts. Its platform shows what people ask AI and what models say back, then connects that data with business context to surface opportunities, deploy agents, and measure impact. With new capital and applied research, Profound aims to power thousands of marketing teams navigating answer engines and agent-driven workflows.