Profound closed a $35 million Series B in August 2025 led by Sequoia Capital, bringing total funding to $58.5 million. The round included participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, NVentures, Saga VC, and South Park Commons.

The company previously raised a $20 million Series A in June 2025 led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from NVentures and Khosla Ventures. Prior to that, Profound raised a $3.5 million seed round in August 2024 from South Park Commons and other early investors.

Profound is a platform that enables brands to monitor, analyze, and optimize their visibility across AI-powered search engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude.

The platform consists of four modules. Answer Engine Insights sends thousands of structured prompts daily to major AI assistants and analyzes the responses to track brand mentions, sentiment, citation sources, and competitive positioning. Users can access visibility scores that indicate the percentage of relevant queries in which their brand appears compared to competitors.

Conversation Explorer functions as a search volume tool for AI queries, leveraging real consumer prompt data to help marketers identify trending questions and monitor how their brands are represented in responses. Agent Analytics provides server-level data on how AI crawlers interact with company websites, detailing which pages are retrieved and the frequency with which different AI models visit specific URLs.

The platform also includes workflow automation for generating content briefs and full articles optimized for AI citation. These AI-authored pieces are designed for language model consumption, incorporating features such as semantic chunking, comprehensive data tables, and metadata optimization to improve the likelihood of being referenced in AI-generated responses.

Profound operates as a B2B SaaS platform targeting enterprise marketing teams with a consumption-based pricing model structured within subscription tiers. The company generates revenue through monthly and annual plans that combine platform access with usage allowances for AI query monitoring and content generation.

The go-to-market strategy prioritizes enterprise sales to Fortune 500 companies while also providing a self-serve tier for mid-market customers. Sales cycles typically involve AI visibility audits that quantify how brands currently appear across various AI assistants, offering measurable insights upfront.

The platform processes millions of AI queries monthly, creating a proprietary dataset that tracks search patterns, citation behaviors, and content optimization tactics. This dataset grows in value as customer usage increases, enabling Profound to refine its recommendations and sustain competitive differentiation.

Revenue growth is driven by higher usage as customers expand monitoring to additional keywords, competitors, and AI platforms, alongside upsells to advanced features such as real-time agent monitoring and automated content workflows. The model benefits from high switching costs, as customers integrate Profound's data into their content strategies and performance measurement systems.

Direct competitors include AthenaHQ, which provides AI visibility monitoring at lower price points targeting mid-market customers, and Scrunch AI, which specializes in agent experience optimization and hallucination detection. Siftly focuses on B2B SaaS companies with revenue attribution features, while European competitors such as Peec AI and Otterly.AI emphasize localization and GDPR compliance.

These startups are competing to scale their data capabilities and establish enterprise credibility. Most offer basic prompt monitoring and citation tracking. Profound differentiates itself with crawler analytics and automated content generation features.

Established companies like BrightEdge, Conductor, and seoClarity are incorporating AI search modules into their existing SEO platforms. These firms have extensive enterprise customer bases and can integrate GEO features into existing contracts, which may slow Profound's enterprise adoption.

Traditional SEO tools, however, were designed for Google's link-based ranking system and face challenges adapting to the probabilistic nature of AI-generated responses. Their AI modules often function as extensions rather than native solutions optimized for generative search.

A significant long-term competitive risk comes from AI platforms such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity potentially offering native brand analytics and paid placement options. These platforms control the underlying data and could bypass third-party monitoring tools.

Early indicators include ChatGPT's shopping integration and Perplexity's sponsored query experiments, which suggest that AI platforms may develop direct relationships with brands to optimize visibility and integrate commerce features.

Profound is expanding from monitoring into execution by introducing AI agents that generate and distribute optimized content. The Actions platform can produce thousands of content pieces tailored to specific AI queries, enabling the company to enter the broader marketing automation market, which is valued at over $55 billion globally.

The shopping visibility module tracks product placement in AI commerce experiences, such as ChatGPT Shopping, allowing Profound to address retail media budgets as commerce increasingly adopts conversational interfaces. This marks a shift from traditional search marketing to AI-native commerce optimization.

The platform is broadening its customer base from early adopter tech companies to regulated enterprises in financial services, healthcare, and government sectors. For example, success with customers like U.S. Bank highlights its ability to meet enterprise security and compliance requirements, which supports larger deal sizes and longer contract terms.

Agency partnerships offer another growth avenue. White-label reporting and multi-workspace features enable agencies to resell GEO services to thousands of mid-market brands that may not justify direct enterprise contracts.

International expansion opportunities are emerging as AI assistants gain adoption globally, particularly in regions where Google's search dominance is less pronounced. Adding support for regional AI models and local language optimization could open access to new markets.

Adjacent use cases include PR and reputation management, as brands increasingly need to monitor and influence how AI systems describe them across various contexts, beyond commercial queries. The platform's sentiment analysis and source tracking capabilities make it applicable to broader brand monitoring scenarios.

Platform dependence: Profound's business model depends entirely on access to AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, which could impose restrictions on third-party monitoring, modify their APIs, or develop competing analytics products. Any major platform blocking Profound's data collection would materially affect the service's value proposition and necessitate costly workarounds.

Market maturation: The generative engine optimization category is in its nascent stages, and it is uncertain whether AI search will achieve the scale and stability required to sustain a large ecosystem of optimization tools. If AI assistants fail to capture substantial search volume from Google or if the technology remains too volatile for consistent optimization, the overall market opportunity could contract significantly.

Measurement volatility: AI responses are probabilistic by nature and vary based on timing, prompt phrasing, and model updates, creating challenges for consistent measurement and optimization. This variability may reduce customer willingness to make significant investments in GEO tools if they cannot reliably demonstrate predictable outcomes from optimization efforts.