Profound Lands $180M In Series D Funding, Reaching $1.8B Valuation

Profound announced on September 15, 2026, that it has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. The round arrives less than seven months after the AI marketing company closed its $96 million Series C.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons all participated in the round. Profound said the new funding will expand its capabilities and support further research into how AI can transform the marketing industry.

Enterprise Traction and Customers

Profound said it now serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, naming Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, and Royal Bank of Canada alongside technology customers such as Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB, and Figma. The company said the platform currently serves over one third of the Fortune 100 and is used by 16% of the Fortune 500, a group it said includes U.S. Bank, and that the platform is built on more than 2 billion real user prompts.

Co-founder and chief executive James Cadwallader described the company’s trajectory in the release. “Profound started as an analytics platform for marketers to understand how buyers discover their brands through AI,” Cadwallader said. “Today, they’re using our Agents to research, write, and report.” He said Profound is now delivering AI Marketer as an agent orchestrator that works alongside every function of a marketing team.

AI Marketer, Context Manager, and Ads Studio

According to the release, AI Marketer scans a brand’s data, analyzes AI answers, surfaces opportunities, and deploys sub-agents to carry out the work. A companion layer, Context Manager, distills company knowledge base files, meeting transcripts, and communication threads so that the AI Marketer adjusts as a brand’s positioning evolves.

AI Marketer also works with Ads Studio, which Profound describes as its latest product. The company said the combination lets marketers build, launch, and manage AI Search advertising campaigns across OpenAI, Google, and Meta’s ad managers, with tracking handled by Profound’s own pixel. William Yen, head of strategic growth initiatives at Ramp, praised the ads workflow in a statement included in the release, and Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman said Profound is expanding from AI Search into a broader platform for how modern marketing teams operate.

Profound’s website presents the platform as offering enterprise governance features, including role-based access control, SCIM provisioning, and SOC 2 compliance, and says it supports more than 200 integrations.

Earlier company announcements document Profound’s prior rounds. The company’s blog records a $3.5 million seed round announced on August 12, 2024, backed by Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, and South Park Commons; a $20 million Series A announced on June 18, 2025, led by Kleiner Perkins; and a $35 million round announced on August 12, 2025. On February 24, 2026, the company announced a $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic, Saga Ventures, and South Park Commons participating. The February release said that round brought total funding above $155 million one day shy of the company’s 18-month anniversary, and that Profound at the time served more than 700 enterprises and over 10% of the Fortune 500, with more than 500 customers using Profound Agents daily. Profound was co-founded by Cadwallader and chief technology officer Dylan Babbs.

Expanding the Applied AI Lab

Profound said it will use the Series D investment to expand its applied AI lab in New York City and San Francisco. According to the release, the team will study how frontier models perform on marketing work, evaluate model capabilities, and post-train models specifically for marketing.

The applied AI research team includes research scientists, International Science Olympiad medalists in physics and informatics, and economists, the company said. It is developing a benchmark intended to test how far AI can go in complex marketing assignments, evaluating whether models can understand a business, weigh competing market signals, and produce work across marketing functions. Ali Vaghar, Profound’s head of data, said the company is building the technical rigor and the first evaluation approach needed to make AI genuinely useful for marketers. Sequoia Capital partner Anas Biad said the largest brands are moving quickly to put AI to work across their marketing teams and that Profound has established itself as the applied AI lab those brands rely on.