Profound raised $180 million in a Series D round that values the marketing analytics startup at $1.8 billion, the company said, seven months after a $96 million Series C first made it a unicorn.
Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, with returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures also participating, according to TechCrunch and The Next Web.
Founded in 2024, Profound started as an analytics platform tracking how brands appear in AI systems including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, part of a category known as answer engine optimization, or AEO. It has since expanded into research and marketing strategy tools and has deployed what it calls forward-deployed marketing engineers alongside the software, TechCrunch reported.
The company counts more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including Comcast, Estee Lauder and Walmart, and says revenue tripled in the past six months, per TechCrunch. CEO James Cadwallader told The Next Web that tracking AEO "is becoming one of the most important roles in marketing."
For any company selling to other businesses, Profound's growth is a signal that tracking visibility inside AI answers is turning into its own budget line, not just a subset of search engine optimization spend.