As AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity reshape how people search\u2014siphoning queries away from Google\u2014startups are racing to help brands stay visible in AI-generated responses. Profound, which claims it was the first to stake out this post-SEO space, today announced a $35 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia, with continued backing from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons. The new round brings its total funding to $58.5 million.<\/p>\n
Since launching less than a year ago, the New York City-based company has signed Fortune 10 clients and hundreds more, though it could publicly name only a few, including Ramp, US Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign<\/a>, and Chime. Profound says 2,000 marketers from over 500 organizations now use its platform daily as brands race to secure their place in the AI-first internet. And the race is heating up: according to the Wall Street Journal, AI-powered chatbots now account for more than 5% of U.S. desktop search traffic\u2014up from just 1.3% in early 2024.<\/p>\n Sequoia partner Anas Biad told Fortune the firm\u2019s big bet is on cofounders James Cadwallader, a serial marketing entrepreneur, and Dylan Potts, a former Uber designer. The two met at South Park Commons, a San Francisco community and early-stage fund founded in 2016 by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook\u2019s first female engineer, and Aditya Agarwal, former Dropbox<\/a> CTO. Sequoia views the rise of AI search as a once-in-a-generation platform shift for marketers\u2014one it believes Profound is poised to lead by helping brands monitor how they and their competitors surface in AI-generated results and produce new content to keep pace.<\/p>\n \u201cTheir speed of execution was truly remarkable\u2014in both the product they built and the customers they landed,\u201d said Biad. \u201cWe only back founders who want to build generational companies. Their team is very ambitious and very aggressive.\u201d<\/p>\n Cadwallader, who previously founded influencer marketing firm Kyra, has called the change a \u201cGame of Thrones power shift\u201d from decades of search engine optimization tactics to a new world of AI search. He said he became \u201cobsessed\u201d with Perplexity in early 2024. \u201cIt was so obvious to me that this was an inflection point\u2014once you\u2019ve used AI to search, you quickly understand why our children won\u2019t be using [Google\u2019s] blue links.\u201d<\/p>\n But the shift is bigger than search, he emphasized: it will change the internet itself and become a boardroom-level problem for every marketer. If AI chatbots become the primary way people search, brands will lose direct visibility and control over how they appear to consumers online. That\u2019s not just a marketing issue, he explained\u2014it\u2019s a business challenge that touches revenue, customer acquisition, competitive positioning, and brand identity.<\/p>\n Tackling it, he said, means more than monitoring AI output. It requires creating and optimizing content for a new audience: the bots themselves. \u201cThis is the first time ever you are creating content for bots,\u201d said Cadwallader. \u201cBrands are using Profound to create what humans would probably find boring\u2014highly structured content that\u2019s designed for bots to consume, like a game of telephone.\u201d<\/p>\n Profound tracks how major AI models\u2014from ChatGPT, Grok, and Meta\u2019s LLaMA to Google\u2019s Gemini and Microsoft<\/a> Copilot\u2014surface brand mentions. The company is adding DeepSeek next week. \u201cWe see huge differences across models, and that changes week over week or month over month,\u201d Cadwallader said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like tracking a new species.\u201d<\/p>\n The platform then uses advanced reasoning models, such as OpenAI\u2019s o3 (and now GPT-5), to analyze those insights and generate recommendations, from gap analyses to suggested copy. Those recommendations might involve creating new content, optimizing web pages, producing social posts, or even targeting media outlets influencing AI-generated answers. \u201cThere will always be a human in the loop\u2014it\u2019s not about replacing marketers,\u201d Cadwallader said. \u201cBut what used to take a team of ten, you can now do entirely within Profound.\u201d<\/p>\n The challenge has already expanded beyond marketing. \u201cIt\u2019s become a PR challenge, a content challenge, even a customer support challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cThe models have opinions, and they reflect the internet\u2019s opinions back to users.\u201d<\/p>\n That makes Profound\u2019s ambitions far bigger than SEO. Cadwallader envisions a future where transactions happen directly inside AI assistants\u2014without a single click away\u2014posing competitive threats even to giants like Amazon<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m inspired by Salesforce<\/a>,\u201d he said, pointing to the company\u2019s early-2000s cloud software disruption. \u201cIt\u2019s an example of just how big you can go.\u201d\n<\/p>\n