Profound, a marketing technology company that helps brands show up in AI answers, has raised $180M at a $1.8B valuation.
Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital share the lead on the Series D. Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures and South Park Commons came in alongside Saga Ventures and Evantic.
The product targets a shift in how buyers research. Instead of scanning search results, customers increasingly ask ChatGPT and similar services. Profound’s platform identifies the prompts a brand’s target buyers use, surfaces the most popular ones from the past week, spots patterns across them, and points to ways of raising how often the brand appears in responses.
A retailer selling smartwatches, for example, can see which questions consumers ask while comparing models, then work on the content and citations that make an assistant mention it.
The category, often called generative engine optimisation, has drawn venture money quickly as agencies and software vendors race to measure a channel that traditional search analytics cannot see. Profound’s test is proving that its recommendations move mentions measurably, and that brands keep paying once the novelty fades.
The company is incorporated as Cooper Square Technologies.
