Profound Raises $35M to Help Brands Stay Visible in AI Search

“AI assistants are becoming the new front door to every business,” said James Cadwallader, cofounder and CEO of Profound. “If you’re not showing up in those conversations, you’re invisible to billions of consumers.” Profound just announced a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons.

For brands, the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Gemini changes the calculus of discoverability. Traditional SEO strategies, built around keyword rankings, backlinks, and click-through rates, matter less when AI models generate direct answers rather than lists of links. This change has created a new marketing problem: ensuring that when consumers ask AI systems for product recommendations, their brand appears in the response.

Tracking and Shaping AI Visibility

Cadwallader and cofounder Dylan Babbs, a former Uber software engineer, started Profound in 2024 to address that problem. Based in New York, the company offers a platform that lets brands monitor how they appear across AI assistants, identify gaps, and produce content optimized for AI models rather than human readers.

The software tracks major AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5, Meta’s Llama, and Microsoft’s Copilot, to see how they describe brands and which sources influence their answers. Profound generates thousands of synthetic prompts, such as “cheap football cleats” or “best phone for a teenager,” to gauge brand visibility. It can also detect when an AI bot visits a client’s site, track how often it returns, and measure sentiment based on the language used in generated answers.