Profound, a New York company that helps brands monitor and improve how AI assistants describe and recommend them, raised $180m in a Series D round at a $1.8bn valuation, it announced on 15 September 2026.
Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons also took part.
The round came less than seven months after Profound's $96m Series C, which valued it at $1bn in February 2026. The company said then that it had raised more than $155m in total, which puts its funding to date above $335m.
“Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose built AI to help them do the work.”James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO, Profound
What Profound does
Profound was founded in 2024, according to CMSWire, and is led by co-founder and chief executive James Cadwallader. It started as an analytics platform showing marketers how buyers find their brands through answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. The company says its data is built on more than 2bn real user prompts.
It has since added agents that research, write and report, and is now building AI Marketer, an agent that scans a brand's data, analyses AI answers, identifies opportunities and deploys sub-agents to carry out the work. A tool called Context Manager feeds AI Marketer with company knowledge, meeting transcripts and communication threads. Profound has also launched Ads Studio for building and managing ad campaigns in AI search, which it says works across OpenAI, Google and Meta's ad managers.
"Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose built AI to help them do the work," Cadwallader said in the announcement.
Customers and growth
Profound said it now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, up from more than 700 enterprises at the time of its Series C. Named customers include Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma, and the company says it serves more than a third of the Fortune 100. Estée Lauder announced a separate partnership with Profound on the same day.
The company did not disclose revenue or headcount. The customer figures come from Profound and have not been independently verified.
What the money is for
Profound said the new funding will expand its product and pay for research into how AI can change marketing work. It plans to grow its applied AI lab in New York and San Francisco, where a team of research scientists and economists studies how frontier models perform on marketing tasks, evaluates them and post-trains models for marketing. The team is also building a benchmark for complex marketing assignments.
"As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows," said Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. Anas Biad, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said large brands were moving fast to put AI to work across their marketing teams.
The funding so far
Lightspeed Venture Partners led Profound's Series C in February 2026, with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Saga VC, South Park Commons and Evantic joining. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have now moved from participants to co-leads.
The valuation rose from $1bn to $1.8bn between the two rounds. The company has not said whether any part of the Series D involved the sale of existing shares.
Company website: tryprofound.com