Over 100 million people search with AI every day. B2B buyers are now asking ChatGPT and Perplexity which vendors to consider – and the brands that get cited get the meeting. Profound tracks exactly how AI models represent a brand across every major answer engine, surfaces the prompts that drive discovery, identifies competitive gaps, and deploys AI agents to create content optimised for citation. Before Profound, AI search was a black box. With it, it becomes a measurable, optimisable channel.
Profound was founded in 2024 in New York City by James Cadwallader (CEO) and Dylan Babbs (CTO). The company raised a $3.5 million seed round in August 2024, a $20 million Series A in June 2025 led by Kleiner Perkins, and a $35 million Series B in August 2025 led by Sequoia Capital – bringing total funding to $58.5 million in under 18 months. Investors include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA's venture arm), Saga VC, and South Park Commons. The company hosts Zero Click, its own annual conference for marketers building AI-first strategy, with 2026 events in San Francisco and New York City. Profound is a sponsor of the European ABM Forum 2026.
Profound's platform covers four interconnected capabilities. Answer Engine Insights monitors how a brand is cited, described, and recommended across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google AI Overviews – tracking citation frequency, sentiment, competitive share of voice, and which prompts surface the brand. Prompt Volumes reveals what millions of people are actually asking AI engines, enabling marketing and content teams to align strategy with real buyer demand signals rather than traditional keyword data. Agent Analytics provides server-level data on how AI crawlers interact with a company's website – which pages are visited, how often, and by which AI models – giving teams visibility into how their content is being ingested for training and retrieval. Agents are autonomous AI workers that generate and distribute content optimised specifically for AI citation, including AEO-optimised FAQs, articles, and content briefs designed for language model consumption. The platform also includes a Shopping module tracking brand placement in AI commerce experiences such as ChatGPT Shopping.
Profound serves enterprise marketing, content, and PR teams at B2B SaaS, financial services, retail, and consumer technology companies. George Bonaci, VP of Growth and Demand at Ramp, described Profound as turning AI search from a black box into a competitive advantage. Additional named clients include US Bank, MongoDB, Chime, DocuSign, and Indeed. In B2B specifically, Profound is relevant to ABM programmes where getting cited positively in AI-generated responses is increasingly a precondition for being included in buyer shortlists – as buyers use ChatGPT and Perplexity to research and compare vendors before engaging sales.
Profound has a strategic data partnership with G2, embedding AI visibility data into G2's AI Visibility Dashboard to help B2B software companies understand how their G2 presence translates into LLM citations. Profound is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, and NVIDIA Ventures. The company hosts the Zero Click conference and is a sponsor of the European ABM Forum 2026.
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