Profound Raises $180 Million to Build an AI Platform for Marketing Teams

Profound, a New York-based AI marketing platform, has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons all participating. The round arrives less than seven months after Profound's $96 million Series C.

Founded by CEO James Cadwallader, Profound started as an analytics platform helping marketers understand how buyers discover their brands through AI, and now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands, including Comcast, The Estee Lauder Companies, Walmart, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, and MongoDB, with 16% of the Fortune 500 among its customers. The new funding will expand Profound's applied AI research lab in New York and San Francisco.

Betting that marketing gets rebuilt around AI answer engines

Profound's core thesis is that as buyers increasingly research products through Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity rather than traditional search, brands need to produce and maintain marketing content across thousands of pages, review sites, and other sources those engines draw from, work that outstrips what human marketing teams can keep pace with manually. The company's new AI Marketer product acts as an orchestrator that researches, writes, and reports across a marketing team's functions, and its Ads Studio extends that into paid campaign management across OpenAI, Google, and Meta's ad platforms.

Why two co-lead investors matter at this stage

Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-leading rather than a single firm taking the lead is worth noting on its own: at the Series D stage, a co-led round often signals that demand from top-tier investors outstripped what either firm wanted to allocate alone, rather than one firm needing a partner to fill out the round. Both firms have separately built substantial enterprise AI portfolios over the past two years, and a category-defining answer-engine-optimization platform with Fortune 500 penetration is the kind of asset that multiple large funds compete to back rather than split reluctantly. For founders raising growth-stage rounds in a hot category, a co-lead structure emerging organically from investor demand, rather than being engineered by the company to signal validation, is generally the stronger position to be raising from.

What this means for founders

Profound's jump from a $96 million Series C to a $180 million Series D in under seven months, alongside its Fortune 500 penetration, is a useful marker of how quickly enterprise AI tooling with genuine adoption can compound funding momentum once a product proves itself inside large organizations. For founders building AI tools for a specific business function, the pattern worth noting is Profound's expansion path: start with a narrow, well-defined analytics wedge, then expand into an orchestration layer once the initial product has earned enough trust to be handed broader responsibility.

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