The round
Profound has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, less than seven months after a $96 million Series C, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins led the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and South Park Commons taking part.
What Profound does
The New York company, which launched two years ago, sells marketing software in a category the industry calls answer engine optimisation or generative engine optimisation. The idea is to show brands how AI assistants present them when people ask for recommendations, and to help them change it.
Profound began as an analytics platform and has since expanded into researching and creating marketing material, according to TechCrunch.
The numbers
The growth figures are Profound’s own. The company told TechCrunch that its revenue tripled over the past six months and that it has more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies and Walmart. It did not disclose its revenue.
Why investors are paying up
Search engine optimisation grew into a large industry because a web page of ten links left room for many brands to compete. An AI assistant that answers a shopping question with a short list leaves much less. Brands that are left out of that answer have no second page of results to appear on, which is the anxiety Profound is selling against.
Four rounds in 15 months
The Series D caps a fast run. Profound announced a $20 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins in June 2025, saying its platform had been adopted by thousands of marketers at Fortune 100 brands in the nine months since launch. Two months later it raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia, describing its aim as helping companies “understand and control how AI interprets, talks about, and eventually uses their products”. The $96 million Series C followed, and now a Series D nearly twice that size.
When it raised its Series A, Profound projected that AI conversation traffic would drive more than half of online commerce by 2027, about $2.5 trillion a year. That is the company’s own forecast rather than an independent estimate, but it is the bet its investors are now pricing.
What to watch
The harder question is measurement. AI answers change as the models underneath them are updated, and they vary from one user and one phrasing to the next. Whether that can be tracked reliably enough for marketing budgets to keep flowing to it is what Profound’s next round will be priced on.
