Profound raises $96M Series C at $1B for answer-engine optimization

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Saga VC and South Park Commons participating. The announcement came with Profound Agents, which extends the product from AI brand monitoring into autonomous marketing workflows. A podcast listing dates the announcement to February 24, 2026. Profound reports more than 700 enterprise customers, including about 10% of the Fortune 500, among them Target, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, U.S. Bank and Figma. James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs founded the New York company in 2024. Profound built the agents because customers were taking its data into third-party automation tools. Semrush's AI Toolkit, Peec AI and Otterly.ai compete in the same category. These tools generally measure how often a brand is cited or mentioned across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, prompt by prompt, instead of using keyword rank. For AI founders, the round suggests that visibility inside model answers is becoming a budgeted marketing line, and that a vendor can win by owning the data layer and then selling workflow software on top. Startups that sell into marketing teams should expect buyers to ask how their product appears in AI answers. Tool makers face pressure from a well-funded incumbent that is moving from reporting into execution.