Profound Raises $35M Series B Led by Sequoia as AI Search Race Heats Up

Profound, the AI visibility platform that claims to have been the first company to stake out the post-SEO space, has raised a $35 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The round brings Profound's total funding to $58.5 million, following a $3.5 million seed led by Khosla Ventures and a $20 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins in June 2025. Continued participation from Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons signals strong conviction from the company's existing investor base.

The round comes as AI-powered chatbots now account for more than five percent of U.S. desktop search traffic — up from just 1.3 percent in early 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal. Profound says 2,000 marketers from over 500 organizations now use its platform daily, with publicly named clients including Ramp, U.S. Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign, and Chime.

What Profound Does

Profound tracks how major AI models — from ChatGPT, Grok, and Meta's Llama to Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot — surface brand mentions across more than 1.5 billion real user prompts. The platform processes over 100 million AI search queries each month, supports customers in 18 countries and six languages, and uses advanced reasoning models including OpenAI's o3 to generate content recommendations and gap analyses. Early adopters report a 25 to 40 percent lift in AI answer share-of-voice within 60 days.

The Series A in June 2025 also launched Profound Lite, a self-serve plan at $499 per month aimed at startups and small businesses — a deliberate move to expand the addressable market beyond enterprise. The Series B capital will be used to expand Profound's engineering and data-science teams in New York, deepen coverage across emerging AI platforms, and accelerate product innovation for what co-founder James Cadwallader calls the 'agentic internet.'

Sequoia's Thesis

Sequoia partner Anas Biad told Fortune that the firm views the rise of AI search as a once-in-a-generation platform shift for marketers. 'Their speed of execution was truly remarkable — in both the product they built and the customers they landed,' Biad said. 'We only back founders who want to build generational companies. Their team is very ambitious and very aggressive.'

Cadwallader, who previously founded influencer marketing firm Kyra, has described the shift as a 'Game of Thrones power shift' from decades of SEO tactics to a new world of AI search. His co-founder Dylan Babbs is a former Uber software engineer. The two met at South Park Commons, the San Francisco community and early-stage fund founded by Facebook's first female engineer Ruchi Sanghvi and former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal.

The Bigger Picture

Cadwallader's ambitions extend well beyond search optimization. He envisions a future where transactions happen directly inside AI assistants — without a single click away — posing competitive threats to giants like Amazon. 'I'm inspired by Salesforce,' he said, pointing to the company's early-2000s cloud software disruption. 'It's an example of just how big you can go.'

The challenge, he acknowledges, has already expanded beyond marketing. 'It's become a PR challenge, a content challenge, even a customer support challenge. The models have opinions, and they reflect the internet's opinions back to users.' For Profound, that breadth of use case is a feature, not a scope problem. The platform is positioning itself not as a search optimization tool but as the foundational infrastructure layer for brand presence in an AI-first internet.