Profound raises $180M at $1.8B as brands pay to show up in AI answers

The round was announced on September 15, 2026, and co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons, all existing investors, also took part. It came less than seven months after a Series C of $96M at a $1B valuation. Total funding now exceeds $335M since 2024. The company says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including Walmart, Comcast and Estée Lauder, as well as tech names such as Zoom, Figma and MongoDB. These customer figures are self-reported and have not been independently audited. The money will expand an applied AI lab in New York and San Francisco. The lab will study how frontier models handle marketing work and post-train models specifically for it. That fits a move beyond AI-search analytics into marketing agents. The product line now extends past tracking brand mentions. It includes an AI Marketer and an ads tool. For founders, the round shows how fast a category can form around the distribution channels that model providers control. Buyers are paying to monitor and influence what assistants say about them. Startups selling into marketing teams can expect these budgets to grow. They should also expect measurement vendors to push into execution, and to build or tune their own models for the work.