Profound raises $96M Series C at $1B valuation, launches autonomous marketing agents to manage brand presence across AI platforms

and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And without further ado, we have TVPN Royalty. What's going on? Great to see you, James.

Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. How you doing?

Doing great. Doing great. Good. Uh, calling in from a cave. Are you fully snowed in? What's going on?

No, we're Yeah, we're in New York. The snow is melting. We built a little mini studio in upstairs and uh yeah, it looks pretty professional.

Great. I love it. Uh

professional as you go.

Tell us uh tell us the news and then there's a bunch of stuff we want to talk about. Uh yeah, so I guess uh we're joining today announcing a $96 million series C investment at a $1 billion valuation led by Lightseed Venture Partners alongside Sequoia, Kleiner, Perkins, Avantic, Saga, and South Park.

Amazing. Uh break down everything that's happened since the last time you were on the show. The the the space has been moving so quickly, so it feels like it's been two years even though it's probably been two months. Yeah, I mean it's it's all moving. Everything's moving obviously at 100 miles an hour, but it's it sounds a bit trit when I say this, but it really is a privilege to be building in such exciting times. Um yeah, I mean we we've just launched Profound Agents, which I think is a really big deal. It's, you know, we we serve the marketer. So you know the the the line we've been using during this fund raise is um or during this announcement has been you know Harvey lawyers have Harvey engineers have cursor and marketers have profound and I think that's that's truer than ever in that yeah with this launch of agents it really takes profound uh towards being like a full stack you know holistic platform for the modern day marketer allowing them to you know not just understand how they show up in AI platforms like Chat, GPT, Gemini, the rest of them, but also build agents that can help them do more with less. Um, so yeah, I think this is cool. Yeah, we saw our customers had been, you know, we we we came out of the gates 18 months ago with Profound here in New York and what we saw was our customers quite often were taking our data and insights then going to orchestration and automation tools to do cool things with it. So we've just brought that all inhouse now and uh yeah, it's really cool. you can do everything in one platform.

How how are how do you think the the uh other platforms the LLMs are are evolving? Some of them are launching ads, some aren't. All products are being and services are being discovered in in all of them. Why is it important to have a platform like profound? We were talking about this off air this morning. It feels like uh pe people have been joking around about Manis for example in the meta platform because like Manis is like an agent. wants to help you, but at the same time, what helps what what helps Manis is like spend more money, right? So, it feels like having having a third party

principal agent problem.

Yeah.

Man is like, I've got a great idea.

Uh you guys are more more more user aligned potentially. But how how are you thinking about the interaction between profound and and the different platforms? Yeah, I mean I think you know our prediction of the future is that in the future every company on the planet will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand or products or services. Uh that's kind of a north star that we we hang our hat on. And I think compared to you know search in the early 2000s or even for the last 25 years we it's looking like this will be a much more fragmented um sort of market. I think we're going to see multiple players coming through. So I think profound really sits adjacent to the the models uh or the labs. Um and we help marketing teams understand how they show up in these platforms. Uh you know when AI responds, what does it say about your brand? What does it say about your services? And now we help you build customized agents that can actually, you know, do the work with your with a marketer in the loop. So, um, yeah, we've had hundreds of teams, you know, we work with, I mean, I guess a big thing that I'd say we're announcing since we last spoke, our series B is that we now work with 10% of the Fortune 500, which is a pretty cool start.

What are the other 90% doing?

That's fantastic news.

Yeah. Ready to go.

Yeah. Yeah. We got 90% to go. Job's not done. Um but I think yeah we we work yeah it's it's it's a very cool start

and

you know what we're seeing more and more is that you know every brand is different every marketing team is different everyone has different initiatives everyone has different preferences marketing is is more human than ever in a lot of ways

and I think our approach of helping marketing teams build entirely customized agents that can take out the rote labor from their work is it's just saving giving these teams inordinate amounts of time and energy and it's it's very cool to see it work. Yeah, it's exciting.

Can you walk me through the anatomy of correcting a mistake that exists across LLMs or even in a particular LLM? My nightmare is, you know, you go to you go to chat GPT and ask how tall is John Kugan and it says 65 66. This would this would destroy me. It must be 68. Let's bake that into the pre-training data. 6868. But uh but seriously, other than just like doing a bunch of SEO to correct the record, like how how can a company, if there's truly like a a consistent hallucination, something that's just incorrect for some reason, what is the process to actually change results?

For sure. I mean, well, the first step, which sounds kind of stupid, is just knowing

why it's happening, right? So you the model when when you know let's say an answer engine spits out an answer

you know a good chunk of the time it's getting that answer from somewhere and you know being able to identify hey this is

you know what we found I'll give you an anecdotal example so it was I I won't be able to name the brand but it was a neo bank that

the models were incorrectly spitting out that there there was no FDIC um insurance on and we identified there was coming from a few places it was like some a third party blog I think a couple of Reddit posts um and maybe like a YouTube video or something. So then once you know where it's happening it's kind of uh I wouldn't say it's easy but it's you know it's just kind of 101 marketing. Okay, cool. Let's reach out to the blog and tell them that that's factually incorrect. Let's comment on the Reddit post and say hey this is actually not true. We are FDIC insured. let's produce a YouTube video that speaks to the same thing but you know mentions heavily that we we have FDIC insurance and lo and behold that gets pulled through into the model. So

So that would be something that your agent would do like automatically and you could just set set them off and do that.

Correct. Yeah. You can you could set up an agent that monitors for any misinformation based on a knowledge base of like ground truth and then say okay cool. when we see any misinformation, let's generate an email that reads from our tone of voice and sends to this third party blog and says, "Hey, can you correct this?" for example.

So, yeah, but that it has to be customized cuz, you know, you wouldn't be a that's you'd never have that as an out ofthe-box solution, right? It has to be everything's, you know, it's almost like being able to build one forone software. This is this new paradigm of aic software, which is so so cool. And obviously, I'm not the only one that's excited about it.

Yeah. Uh I mean you're in a very interesting uh uh vantage point in the industry because you work with so many Fortune 500 companies. What are your expectations for Agentic Commerce this year? We were just talking to the Collisons. They it feels like it's on the precipice. Everyone we've talked to is extremely bullish. But I'm always interested to hear like the shape of the bullishness. what what you think needs to happen to actually get people shopping agentically this year?

I mean, I think so much of that inflection is going to come from the models themselves or the consumer products. So, you know, chat GBT and Gemini's ability to actually offer a fantastic user experience. I think that that will be the kind of, you know, that that's the most important thing. Uh I think from the other side of the fence working with these brands, these marketing teams um they're as a hot take they're not and I really I hope this doesn't sound like disrespectful at all but they're they're not as slow as you'd imagine like these giant we work with giant brands uh Fortune 500, you know, some Fortune 10 and they're ferociously fast. they they understand the magnitude of this platform shift and it's very sophisticated teams. A lot of them are SEO teams who I actually think are fantastically well suited to kind of attack this problem space because they're like kind of technical and they understand the sort of primitives of marketing and content etc. They're quite crossunctional. Um but yeah, I I think the a mistake would be to to think that the enterprise is super slow. I don't think that's true. I'm not just there's no sync there. I'm actually I actually believe that.

Yeah. No, I can.

Well, I asked uh I asked Chad GBT what's the best uh geo tool for startups. It says profound

what it does tracks how your brand appears inside LM. It's best for VC serious about AI distribution. So

dog fooding. I mean we put a lot of we put a lot of profound in the pre-training data last year. It was great partner.

Did it mention agents though? That's the question, right? We only know agents today. Okay, Julie, ask it. What did they launch today?

Oh, there you go. Uh, while he does that, tell me uh what you think of the word geo. Is that too buzzwordy? Do you like that term? What are what are the pros and cons of having a term applied to your industry, your nent business plan?

I think go sucks, okay,

as a as an acronym. Uh, it's just bad in so many ways. I think you know it can't be claimed by because of geography it is already taken

um

oh yeah

it stands for yeah generative engine optimization which I don't people don't refer to these products as have you ever heard anyone refer to chat GBC as a generative engine

they don't yeah you're right they do like Google is a search engine for sure Bing is a search engine but no one calls

what's your preferred what's your preferred acronym

I mean so without you know, said sort of with with not much passion, answer engine optimization feels more fitting to me. Um, I I I think it is still all to be determined. I think how your brand is spoken about by AI

Mhm.

will become the most important primitive in marketing. So, I think it it it's going to become bigger than just a kind of uh you know, something that you you put a label on like that. Uh I think we we see a new a sort of new type of marketer forming over time which is interesting. The marketing engineer um you know the the an a marketer who has the technical chops to be able to go in and build agents, customize agents, deploy agents um for the rest, you know, cross functioning AC, you know, across teams and yeah, I think that's very interesting. We we announced uh profound university today. So does this work if I press that? Can you can you see? There we go. That's elite.

THAT'S AN ELITE.

WOW, THAT looks

glasses in series C.

Oh yeah.

How much you guys?

Yeah. So, we announced Profound University.

Cool.

Today. Very cool.

Um,

which is Yeah. It's actually really It's really awesome. It's a series of certifications, training cohorts, um, learning uh, materials that essentially enables the this new era of the marketing engineer. Sure.

And yeah, we're we're very excited about that. So, um, yeah, I think that we're going to see a lot changing in the world of marketing, as I guess is true in most

Chad is saying that AO is a good AO.

AOE.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Always good to have you here, James. Congratulations.

It's great to see

and we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, James.

Have a good rest of your day.

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