AI isn’t just reshaping search—it’s reshaping how brands get discovered. Profound is betting that shift will redefine marketing itself.

The AI marketing infrastructure startup Profound announced it has reached a $1 billion valuation following a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing backers including Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins joined the round, pushing total funding past $155 million—just one day before the company’s 18-month anniversary.

For a company that barely existed a year and a half ago, that’s not just growth. It’s velocity.

Marketing for an AI-Mediated Internet

Profound’s core thesis is blunt: brand discovery is increasingly mediated by AI answer engines and autonomous agents. Traditional SEO isn’t disappearing, but it’s no longer sufficient.

Consumers now encounter brands inside AI-generated responses—recommendations, summaries, comparisons—often before visiting a website. As AI agents begin researching and transacting on users’ behalf, brands must optimize not just for human readers but for machine interpreters.

“AI Search is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing,” said James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound. “As AI Agents act for consumers to research, compare, and transact, brands need their own Agents doing the same thing on the other side.”

That “agent-to-agent” dynamic sits at the heart of Profound’s pitch. If machines are influencing purchase decisions, marketers need infrastructure to monitor, measure, and shape what those machines say.

From Visibility to Autonomous Execution

Profound started by addressing a simple but emerging blind spot: brands couldn’t see how they appeared inside AI-generated answers.

The company built a platform to track brand visibility, sentiment, and performance across AI answer engines. Think of it as analytics for AI-mediated discovery.

Now, it’s expanding beyond monitoring into execution.

The centerpiece is Profound Agents—customizable, autonomous marketing workers powered by reasoning models and proprietary data. More than 500 customers reportedly use them daily. These agents can:

• Monitor AI conversations and brand mentions

• Interpret intent signals

• Generate and optimize content

• Deploy AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) updates

• Adjust strategy in real time

Rather than stopping at dashboards, Profound aims to close the loop between insight and action. Campaign concepts can move to execution in minutes, not weeks.

Sachin Patel, Partner at Lightspeed, framed the shift as defining the next era of marketing: “Profound Agents expand the product from visibility to autonomous execution, positioning them to define how marketing is done in an agentic world.”

In other words, analytics was phase one. Autonomous marketing operations is phase two.

Enterprise Traction—and Competitive Context

Profound says it now supports more than 700 enterprises and serves over 10% of the Fortune 500 across CPG, financial services, retail, pharma, and B2B tech. Customers include brands like Target, Walmart, MongoDB, and U.S. Bank.

It was also named a Top 50 AI Product in G2’s Best Software Products 2026, ranking alongside mainstream AI tools.

That traction reflects a broader scramble among enterprises to adapt to AI-driven discovery. As generative AI platforms increasingly shape product comparisons and recommendations, brand representation becomes algorithmic.

The race is on to define AEO—the successor to SEO. Several startups are circling the category, but Profound is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer rather than a point solution.

Case Studies: Agents in Action

Early adopters are already leaning into the autonomous model.

Deel is reportedly scaling its content engine through Profound’s agent workflows and automations. MongoDB is automating AI visibility reporting. Plaid is deploying AEO-optimized FAQs across hundreds of pages.

The pattern is clear: enterprises are experimenting with AI not just for content generation but for systematic, always-on optimization.

Generic AI tools can draft emails or write blog posts. Profound’s argument is that its agents operationalize marketing intelligence—monitoring signals, interpreting intent, and executing within structured workflows.

If SEO was about ranking pages, AEO is about influencing AI narratives.

Formalizing the “Marketing Engineer”

Alongside the funding announcement, Profound launched the Profound Ecosystem—a structured effort to train and certify marketers in AI search and agentic workflows.

The initiative includes:

• Profound University: Training programs focused on AEO and AI-driven marketing operations

• Community Certification: Credentials for marketers and agencies building expertise in AI Search

• Agency Marketplace: A curated network of certified partners delivering AI-native marketing services

The broader goal is to define a new professional archetype: the Marketing Engineer—a hybrid operator fluent in strategy, data, and AI systems.

As marketing becomes more automated and model-driven, traditional content and performance roles may increasingly blend with technical skill sets. Profound is attempting to build not just a product, but an ecosystem around that shift.

Why Investors Are Leaning In

A $1 billion valuation in under two years signals strong investor conviction that AI-mediated discovery represents a durable market transition.

Search was once a blue-link experience. Today, AI systems summarize, recommend, and increasingly transact. Tomorrow, autonomous consumer agents could make purchasing decisions directly.

If that trajectory holds, the infrastructure that helps brands influence AI systems could become as foundational as CRM platforms or ad tech once were.

The risk? The category is still forming. Standards around AI transparency, attribution, and influence remain fluid. And large incumbents may expand into AEO capabilities over time.

But the opportunity is sizable. Marketing budgets remain massive, and any platform that convincingly ties AI visibility to revenue impact will command attention.

The Bottom Line

Profound’s Series C isn’t just a funding milestone. It’s a declaration that AI-driven discovery demands a new marketing stack.

By combining AI analytics, autonomous agents, and an emerging professional ecosystem, Profound is staking a claim as the infrastructure layer for an agentic internet—where machines recommend, compare, and transact.

If the next decade of marketing is defined by AI-to-AI interaction, Profound wants to be the operating system on the brand side of that equation.

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