Top AI Product

If you’ve been paying any attention to the marketing tech space lately, you’ve probably seen [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com) popping up everywhere. And for good reason — the company just closed a [$96 million Series C](https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusive-as-ai-threatens-search-profound-raises-96-million-to-help-brands-stay-visible/) at a $1 billion valuation, hitting unicorn status just 18 months after being founded. That’s an absurdly fast trajectory, and it tells you something about how urgent the problem they’re solving actually is.

So what does Profound do? In short, it tracks how AI models talk about your brand. Think about it — when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to recommend a product, there’s no list of ten blue links anymore. You get one synthesized answer. Either your brand is in that answer, or it’s not. Profound gives companies visibility into where they stand across these AI-driven answer engines, what competitors are doing differently, and how to actually influence those results. The company calls this “Answer Engine Optimization,” and honestly, it makes total sense as a category.

The numbers back up the hype. Profound already works with over 700 enterprise customers, including more than 10% of the Fortune 500 — names like Target, Walmart, Figma, Ramp, and MongoDB. Their latest funding round, [led by Lightspeed](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/02/24/3243475/0/en/Profound-Raises-Series-C-at-1B-Valuation-to-Lead-a-New-Category-of-Marketing.html) with Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins also in the mix, brings their total raised to over $155 million. The [Fortune exclusive](https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusive-as-ai-threatens-search-profound-raises-96-million-to-help-brands-stay-visible/) broke the news, and coverage quickly spread across [SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/24/profound-raises-96m-1b-valuation-ai-discovery-monitoring-platform/) and [TipRanks](https://www.tipranks.com/news/private-companies/profound-hits-1-billion-valuation-with-96-million-series-c-to-scale-ai-driven-marketing-agents).

What’s particularly interesting is the timing of their new feature launch — Profound Agents. These are autonomous workflows that can draft content, update knowledge sources, and trigger actions based on how AI models are currently representing your brand. CEO James Cadwallader has been talking about how traditional SEO specialists are becoming “marketing engineers,” and tools like this are exactly why.

One stat from their research really stuck with me: up to 90% of cited sources in AI answers can change over time. That means the AI search results you see today could look completely different next week. For brands that have spent years perfecting their Google rankings, that’s a wake-up call. And it’s exactly the gap Profound is filling — with a team of fewer than 120 people, no less.

Whether you’re in marketing, brand strategy, or just curious about where discovery is heading, Profound is worth keeping on your radar. The [Profound Index](https://www.tryprofound.com/profound-index) is a good place to start — it’s a free, public ranking showing which brands are most visible across major answer engines.