NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Profound today announced it has reached $1 billion in valuation and raised a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Saga VC, South Park Commons, and Evantic joined the round, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $155 million one day shy of its 18-month anniversary.
Profound is building the marketing infrastructure for an internet where brand discovery is mediated by AI. The company has rapidly become a critical platform for enterprises globally as Answer Engines increasingly generate recommendations and act on behalf of users. Today, Profound serves more than 10 percent of the Fortune 500, supporting more than 700 enterprises across CPG, Finserve, Retail, Pharma, Consumer Tech, B2B Tech verticals, including leading brands like Target, Figma, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank. Profound was also named a Top 50 AI Product in G2's Best Software Products 2026, ranking #34 across all B2B software, alongside ChatGPT, ElevenLabs, Gemini, Notion, and Lovable.
"Profound Agents expand the product from visibility to autonomous execution, positioning them to define how marketing is done in an agentic world," said Sachin Patel, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "They are building the marketing platform for the future of discovery."
AI-Driven Discovery Is Reshaping Marketing
The surfaces where consumers discover brands have expanded. Traditional search remains foundational, but as AI Agents increasingly browse and buy on consumers' behalf, every brand will need a strategy for being understood, trusted, and recommended by machines.
AI conversations are, in many cases, the first time a consumer encounters a brand. Companies need to know what these systems actually say about them, what they recommend, and the associated sentiment. For decades, marketing software has been defined by measurement. But AI Search demands something new: not just visibility into what's being said, but the ability to influence it. Profound has defined that category. Marketers don't just monitor AI conversations. They shape them.
"AI Search is the biggest platform shift in the history of marketing. As AI Agents act for consumers to research, compare, and transact, brands need their own Agents doing the same thing on the other side," said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound. "That agent-to-agent dynamic is where discovery, marketing, and commerce are headed."
From Analytics to Autonomous Marketing
Profound began by solving a fundamental gap: marketers are no longer marketing exclusively to humans. Profound introduced the first platform purpose-built to track brand visibility, sentiment, and performance across AI Answer Engines.
Today, over 500 customers now use Profound Agents daily: customizable, autonomous workers that collapse the time between campaign concept and execution. Using Agents powered by reasoning models and proprietary data, Profound enables brands to continuously create, adapt, and optimize how they're represented by AI systems. These Agents augment existing workflows. There are content Agents, monitoring Agents, AEO Agents, PR Agents, and more that monitor signals, interpret intent, generate content, and adjust strategy in real time, allowing marketing teams to scale.
“We're giving marketers a toolkit that can act as an extension of their team and scale on their behalf," said Cadwallader.
Profound's platform is designed to meet that urgency by combining analytics, content generation, and autonomous execution into a single system, closing the loop between insight and action.
Introducing Profound Agents
Marketing is at an inflection point. AI Agents act on behalf of consumers. Profound Agents scale operations on behalf of brands. They are customizable, autonomous workers that collapse the time between campaign concept and execution. Profound Agents 10x the productivity of the modern marketer.
Already, Deel is scaling their content engine with Agents. "A lot of our success is built on [Agent] workflows and automations," says Anja Simic, Director of Content Marketing at Deel. MongoDB is automating AI visibility reporting, and Plaid is deploying AEO-optimized FAQs across hundreds of pages. "Profound [Agent] workflows have allowed us to thoughtfully incorporate AI search into our content optimizations," said Sarah Shaffer, Organic Growth Specialist at Plaid.
Generic agentic tools execute tasks. Profound Agents operationalize marketing intelligence.
Launching the Profound Ecosystem
A new class of marketing professional is building their businesses on Profound. Agencies and consultants of all sizes are using the platform to create and sell entirely new AI marketing services -- deploying custom Agents, optimizing for AI Search, and delivering work that legacy tools simply can't support.
Profound is formalizing this with the Profound Ecosystem, a combination of training, certification, and a curated Agency Marketplace that connects brands with practitioners who have built real expertise on the platform.
- Profound University: Training programs to help marketers master AEO and agentic workflows.
- Community Certification: A credentialing system for marketers, agencies, and practitioners building expertise in AI Search.
- Agency Marketplace: A curated network of certified partners who can execute AEO strategies at scale.
Together, these initiatives formalize the Marketing Engineer, a hybrid of marketer, data practitioner, and agentic operator. This is the infrastructure for a new marketing profession.
About Profound
Profound is the marketing platform for the era of AI. Thousands of teams use Profound’s automated workflows to understand, control, and scale how they appear across AI Search. Trusted by Figma, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank, Profound arms visionary marketers with the tools to win the zero-click internet.
Media Contact
Layla Baradaran
Media@Tryprofound.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/127286ff-8008-469a-ac48-aa2e3f3c2354
