Profound has raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, as brands increasingly look to understand and improve how they appear across AI-powered search and answer engines.

The latest round comes less than seven months after the company raised $96 million in Series C funding, reflecting growing interest in the emerging Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) market.

$180M Series D

The round was led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, with existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and South Park Commons also participating.

Profound has now raised more than $300 million in funding as it expands from analytics into a broader marketing technology platform built around AI-driven discovery.

Founded in 2024, the company initially focused on analytics before expanding its platform to help businesses understand and improve their presence across AI-powered search.

The Rise of AI Search

Traditional search has long been dominated by SEO, with marketers competing for visibility through keywords, rankings, backlinks and content.

AI-powered search is changing that model.

Consumers can now ask conversational questions and receive synthesized answers rather than a traditional list of search results. For marketers, this creates a new challenge: how does a brand become visible and understood when the answer is being generated by an AI system?

That's where AEO and GEO come in.

Profound's platform helps companies understand how AI systems surface their brands, what those systems say about them and how their visibility changes across AI-driven search experiences.

From Analytics to AI-Powered Marketing

Profound's evolution reflects a broader shift in marketing technology.

AI-native platforms are increasingly helping marketing teams research, analyze and act on how their brands appear within AI-generated answers.

This creates a new layer of marketing intelligence alongside traditional search, social and web analytics.

Enterprise Adoption

Profound says it now works with more than 1,000 enterprise customers, including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies and Walmart.

The company also reported that its revenue has increased threefold over the past six months.

The growth comes as large organizations increasingly experiment with AI-powered discovery and look for ways to understand how their brands are represented across these new search experiences.

Why It Matters for Marketing Teams

For years, marketers optimized websites and content primarily for traditional search engines. Now, they also need to consider how AI systems interpret and present their brands.

That creates a new marketing discipline where visibility is no longer just about ranking a webpage. It's also about becoming part of the answer.

As AI search develops, marketers will need new tools, data and workflows to understand and respond to these changing customer journeys.

The Bigger Picture

Profound's latest funding round highlights how quickly AI is moving deeper into the marketing technology stack.

The next phase of AI marketing may go beyond generating content faster. It could increasingly involve understanding how AI systems discover information and continuously adapting marketing strategies around AI-driven customer journeys.