Profound, an 18-month-old startup betting that the future of marketing will be shaped not by Google links but by AI answers, is now a unicorn.
The company has raised its $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with continued participation by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic Capital, Saga VC, and South Park Commons, Fortune has learned. The round brings total funding to $155 million and follows its Series B, which Fortune previously reported as one of the more aggressive early bets on “answer‑engine optimization” in the generative AI era.
For decades, marketers have fought to climb search rankings. Those days are fading fast, Profound CEO and cofounder James Cadwallader told Fortune. Profound, he says, is reshaping how we experience “search”by helping brands measure, and ultimately influence, what systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about them.
“In the future, every company on the planet will care deeply about how AI talks about and surfaces—and at some point interacts with—their brand,” Cadwallader said. “As long as marketing exists, Profound has a place.”
Profound’s software tracks how AI models describe and recommend brands across millions of real prompts. It can show customers not just whether they appear in AI answers, but why and what competitors are doing differently.
That level of insight is becoming increasingly critical as AI assistants displace traditional search: Instead of scanning pages of results, users now receive a single synthesized answer.
“There’s this massive migration happening, where consumer attention is moving from search engines into answer engines,” Lightspeed partner Sachin Patel told Fortune. “Profound is building the system of record for marketers in that world—the place where they understand and shape how AI represents their brand.”
Profound already works with more than 700 enterprise customers and 10% of the Fortune 500 companies, including Target, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, U.S. Bank, and Figma. The company says customers have used its platform to increase AI visibility in weeks, in some cases dramatically improving how often their brands appear in AI-generated recommendations.
This reflects how fluid AI-driven discovery remains. Profound’s internal research found that up to 90% of cited sources in AI answers can change over time, and that different models rely on largely distinct sets of sources. In practice, that means brands must actively manage their presence across multiple AI ecosystems, rather than optimizing once for a single search engine.
Cadwallader sees this shift as an expansion of SEO, not its extinction.
“There’s this idea that SEO is dead, and I very much disagree,” he said. “Our business is built on the shoulders of SEO, but this is way bigger.”
That evolution is also reshaping marketing roles. Traditional SEO specialists are becoming what Cadwallader calls “marketing engineers”—operators who combine analytics, automation, and AI systems to influence how models interpret and recommend products.
Profound is investing heavily to stay ahead. The company has fewer than 120 employees but is competing for talent with top AI labs and well-funded startups, and Cadwallader is out hiring.. Profound has also just launched Profound Agents, which helps generate and distribute marketing copy in a company’s voice.
“We’ve very rarely seen a company scale this quickly with real enterprise adoption,” Lightspeed’s Patel said. “This isn’t a theoretical shift, it’s happening now.
