Profound Raises $20M as Brands Race from Blue Links to AI Answers

Series A fuels launch of Profound Lite and cements Profound as the leading marketing platform to help brands navigate an AI-first, zero-click internet

Profound, the platform relied on by marketers to understand and control how they show up in AI responses, announces a $20 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, South Park Commons and SV Angel.

Notable angels joining the round include Guillermo Rauch (Founder, Vercel), Andrew Karam (Co-founder, Applovin), Jordan Singer (CEO, Mainframe), Jordi Hays (TBPN), David Senra (Founders Podcast) and Kevin Wang (CPO, Braze). The funding accelerates Profound’s mission to build a platform to enable marketers to navigate the new “agentic” internet.

AI search has Gone Mainstream, Brands are Flying Blind

ChatGPT recently crossed one billion weekly active users, and more than 60 percent of consumers now start product research with an AI assistant instead of a traditional search engine. Yet most companies have zero insight into what those assistants say about their brand and no idea how to control it.

“In a zero-click world, the conversation between consumers and an AI agent is the new first impression,” said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound. “Profound shows marketers exactly how chatbots describe their products and gives them the levers to shape that narrative. AI Visibility will become a boardroom level priority for all brands by 2026.”

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The Profound Platform—Purpose-built for AI visibility

Features and benefits of Profound multi-product platform include:

• Answer Engine Insights: Shows how chatbots describe your brand, products, and industry
• Agent Analytics: Reveals how AI bots crawl and interpret your website
• Conversation Explorer: Surfaces emerging topics trending in AI search
• Agents: Uses the latest reasoning models to crunch the data and provides actionable insights for marketers

Profound processes more than 100 million AI search queries each month, supports customers in 18 countries and six languages, and already counts enterprises like Indeed, MongoDB, and Ramp among its users. Early adopters report a 25-40 percent lift in AI answer share-of-voice within 60 days.

Introducing Profound Lite—AI Visibility for all businesses

Alongside the funding, Profound is launching Profound Lite, a self-serve plan priced at $499 per month that brings leading AI visibility tooling to startups and small businesses.

“Over the past six months AI Visibility has shifted from a Fortune 500 concern to a must-have for every brand, big or small,” said Cadwallader. “Profound Lite puts that power in the hands of startups and lean teams, letting them see and shape how AI agents talk about them. By 2026 AI Visibility will be the most important category of marketing – and Profound will be the platform that helps brands win.”

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Investor perspective

The new capital will expand Profound’s engineering and data-science teams in New York, deepen coverage across emerging AI platforms, and accelerate product innovation aimed at the coming “agentic” internet where websites are built for agentic and human use.

“Profound is the clear leader in a category that will define modern marketing,” said Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “As the web shifts from pages to AI answers, Profound provides the infrastructure every company will need.”