Profound raises $180 million Series D at $1.8 billion valuation

Profound said it has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons.

The company announced the round from New York on Sept. 15, 2026 via GlobeNewswire and a blog post by co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader. Bloomberg reported the same figures and said Profound, founded in 2024, has raised more than $335 million to date to help brands adapt as buyers start queries on chatbots rather than classic search.

Why marketers are buying AEO tools

Profound started as an analytics platform for how buyers discover brands through AI answers, Cadwallader said in the press release, and has expanded into agents that research, write, and report. The company argues that answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity pull from huge numbers of sources when judging a brand, so teams must cover product pages, documentation, reviews, earned media, and social at a scale traditional SEO playbooks do not match.

Cadwallader's blog frames that shift as Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, and says agents favor current, specific, first-principles content over marketing platitudes. Cloudflare's June 3, 2026 report that bot traffic had overtaken human traffic on the web, cited in the blog, is offered as evidence that marketing volume requirements are rising.

Product bet: AI Marketer and Context Manager

Funding will expand capabilities and applied AI research for marketing, the company said. Its AI Marketer product is pitched as an agent that scans brand data and AI answers, surfaces opportunities, and deploys sub-agents; Context Manager stores organization and individual context so outputs stay on brand. Ads Studio is described as extending the same stack into paid campaigns across OpenAI, Google, and Meta ad managers.

Cadwallader wrote that Profound sits at the application layer above interchangeable models, so teams can switch frontier systems while keeping proprietary context. The company said it will grow applied AI labs in New York City and San Francisco to evaluate and post-train models for marketing work, including a benchmark for complex marketing assignments.

Traction and the remaining unknowns

The newsroom release said Profound serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands and over one third of the Fortune 100, naming customers such as Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Zoom, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma. Cadwallader's blog separately said more than 2,500 brands use the platform. Bloomberg described the software's early launch as tracking how often models mention brands and in what context.

Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman and Sequoia partner Anas Biad both praised the team's domain-plus-research approach in company-quoted remarks. The round lands less than seven months after a $96 million Series C, per Profound.

Public materials do not disclose revenue, burn, or independent usage audits. The near-term watch is whether AI Marketer, showcased for a Sept. 30 live look in Cadwallader's post, converts enterprise trials into durable spend as answer-engine discovery keeps shifting.

Key facts: Round: $180M Series D at $1.8B valuation; announced Sept. 15, 2026 Leads: Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins (co-lead); prior investors participate Prior: $96M Series C less than seven months earlier; Bloomberg cites $335M-plus raised to date Customers: Newsroom cites 1,000-plus enterprise brands and over one third of Fortune 100

Kaynaklar: 1 Birincil: https://www.tryprofound.com/newsroom/profound-raises-usd180m-series-d-at-usd1-8b-valuation-to-build-the-ai-platform-for-marketing-teams.html | Profound Raises $180M Series D at $1.8B Valuation to Build the AI Platform For Marketing Teams | Profound 2 İkincil: https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/series-d | Building the AI platform for marketing | Profound (James Cadwallader) 3 İkincil: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-15/profound-hits-1-8-billion-value-to-boost-brands-in-ai-search | Profound Hits $1.8 Billion Value to Boost Brands in AI Search | Bloomberg 4 İkincil: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/09/15/3362180/0/en/profound-raises-180m-series-d-at-1-8b-valuation-to-build-the-ai-platform-for-marketing-teams.html | Profound Raises $180M Series D at $1.8B Valuation | GlobeNewswire