AI marketing startup Profound has raised $180 million in a Series D funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, valuing the two-year-old company at $1.8 billion. The platform helps brands monitor and optimize their visibility within AI-generated search results on tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. Alongside the funding, Profound announced a global partnership with prestige beauty giant The Estée Lauder Companies to deploy its answer engine optimization tools across its entire brand portfolio.
Profound Series D funding round
- ▪Profound's Series D funding round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures.
- ▪The New York-based artificial intelligence marketing startup Profound raised $180 million in a Series D funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation.
- ▪The Series D round nearly doubled Profound's valuation from the $1 billion valuation it reached during its Series C round seven months earlier in February 2026.
- ▪Profound has raised more than $335 million in total capital since the company was founded in 2024.
Answer engine optimization platform
- ▪Profound has built agentic tools that monitor brand mentions and can suggest or execute content changes to optimize product description pages, blogs, and YouTube channels.
- ▪Profound was named the sole leader on G2's inaugural Winter 2026 Answer Engine Optimization grid.
- ▪Profound's software tracks how often a brand is mentioned in AI responses, the sentiment or context of those mentions, and the brand's positioning relative to competitors.
- ▪Profound operates an analytics platform built for answer engine optimization, which helps brands track and improve how they appear inside AI-generated answers across tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
AI search visibility shift
- ▪Consumers are increasingly shifting their attention from traditional search engine blue links to AI assistants and chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini to discover products and seek advice.
- ▪Traditional search engine optimization tools cannot provide brands with sufficient data regarding how they are represented inside zero-click AI search results.
Estée Lauder Companies partnership
- ▪The partnership will provide The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. with a unified view of how its brands are recommended across major AI search platforms globally.
- ▪The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. announced a global strategic partnership with Profound to deploy its generative engine optimization and AI marketing capabilities across its full portfolio of brands.
Enterprise customer adoption
- ▪Profound's enterprise customer base includes major corporations and innovators such as Comcast, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma.
- ▪Profound currently serves more than 700 enterprise customers, including approximately 10% to 16% of the Fortune 500.
Debatable claims
- ▪Brands should not allow AI agents to autonomously modify their public content
- ▪Generative engine optimization undermines the reliability of AI-generated answers
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