August 12, 2025 • News
As artificial intelligence fundamentally transforms how people search for information online, a New York-based startup is positioning itself to become the definitive solution for brands navigating this new landscape. Profound announced a $35 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, marking a significant milestone in the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered search marketing.
The funding round, which brings the company's total funding to $58.5 million, included continued participation from notable investors including Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons. This substantial investment reflects growing investor confidence in solutions that address the seismic shift occurring in digital marketing as AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity increasingly capture search traffic traditionally dominated by Google.
The urgency behind Profound's mission becomes clear when examining current market trends. According to The Wall Street Journal, AI-powered chatbots now account for more than 5% of U.S. desktop search traffic, representing a dramatic increase from just 1.3% in early 2024. This shift presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses seeking to maintain their online visibility.
Traditional search engine optimization strategies, developed over decades for platforms like Google, are becoming less effective as users increasingly turn to AI assistants for answers. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, they receive direct responses rather than a list of blue links to click through. This fundamental change means brands must adapt their content strategy to ensure AI models mention them favorably in their responses.
Profound claims to be the first company to recognize and address this post-SEO landscape. The platform helps brands monitor how they appear in AI-generated responses across multiple models and provides tools to optimize their content specifically for AI consumption. This represents a completely new category of marketing technology focused on what the company calls 'marketing to superintelligence.'
Since launching less than a year ago, Profound has demonstrated remarkable traction in the enterprise market. The company has signed Fortune 10 clients and hundreds of additional customers, with over 2,000 marketers from more than 500 organizations now using its platform daily. While confidentiality agreements prevent disclosure of most client names, the company has publicly named several prominent customers including Ramp, US Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign, and Chime.
This rapid adoption reflects the urgency many large companies feel about adapting to AI-powered search. As more consumers rely on AI assistants for information, brands risk losing direct control over how they appear to potential customers. What was once a marketing challenge has evolved into a broader business issue affecting revenue, customer acquisition, competitive positioning, and brand identity.
Sequoia partner Anas Biad emphasized the firm's confidence in Profound's founding team and market opportunity. The partnership with cofounders James Cadwallader, a serial marketing entrepreneur, and Dylan Babbs, a former Uber software engineer, represents Sequoia's belief that AI search constitutes a generational platform shift comparable to previous transformative moments in digital marketing.
Profound's platform addresses the complex challenge of optimizing content for AI models rather than human readers. The technology tracks how major AI systems including ChatGPT, Grok, Meta's LLaMA, Google's Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot surface brand mentions in their responses. The company has observed significant variations in how different models present the same brands, with these differences shifting on a weekly or monthly basis.
The platform leverages advanced reasoning models, including OpenAI's latest GPT-5, to analyze these insights and generate actionable recommendations. These might include creating new content, optimizing existing web pages, producing social media posts, or even targeting specific media outlets that influence AI-generated responses. The goal is creating highly structured content designed specifically for AI consumption, representing what Cadwallader describes as 'the first time ever you are creating content for bots.'
This approach requires a fundamental shift in content strategy. Rather than optimizing for human readers who might click through search results, brands must now create content that AI models will find authoritative and relevant when generating responses. This involves understanding how different AI systems process and prioritize information, then structuring content accordingly.
The implications of AI search extend far beyond traditional marketing departments. Profound's clients are discovering that managing AI visibility has become a public relations challenge, a content challenge, and even a customer support issue. AI models form opinions based on the information they process, and these opinions get reflected back to users in conversational responses.
Cadwallader envisions a future where transactions occur directly within AI assistants, potentially bypassing traditional e-commerce platforms entirely. This could pose competitive threats to established players like Amazon while creating new opportunities for brands that successfully adapt to AI-mediated commerce. The company draws inspiration from Salesforce's transformation of enterprise software in the early 2000s, seeing similar potential for disruption in the marketing technology space.
The funding will enable Profound to expand its engineering capabilities and develop more sophisticated tools for this emerging market. With competition in the AI tools space intensifying, as evidenced by recent developments like Elon Musk's xAI making Grok 4 available to all users, companies are racing to establish dominance in specific AI application areas.
Profound's success reflects broader trends in how artificial intelligence is reshaping digital marketing and consumer behavior. As AI assistants become more sophisticated and widely adopted, the traditional boundaries between search, content marketing, and brand management are blurring. Companies that adapt quickly to these changes may gain significant competitive advantages, while those that rely on outdated optimization strategies risk losing visibility in an AI-mediated internet.
The company's rapid growth and substantial funding round signal investor confidence that AI search marketing represents a large and growing market opportunity. As more businesses recognize the need to optimize for AI rather than traditional search engines, platforms like Profound are positioned to become essential tools in the modern marketing stack.
This evolution parallels other significant shifts in digital marketing, from the rise of social media marketing to the adoption of programmatic advertising. However, the AI search transformation may prove even more fundamental, as it changes not just how brands reach customers, but how consumers discover and interact with information about products and services.