Profound raises $180M from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins to become the canonical AI marketing company

Profound raises $180M from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins

Profound, the AI marketing platform founded by James Cadwallader, has closed a $180 million round led by Sequoia Capital with Kleiner Perkins co-investing. The company now counts roughly a third of the Fortune 100 as customers, including Walmart, Zoom, Royal Bank of Canada, and Ramp.

What the platform does

Profound launched two years ago around a single question: how does AI talk about your brand? Cadwallader describes that as the first product — monitoring how ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and similar answer engines represent a company's products and services. The second product followed naturally: once brands could see how they showed up, they needed tools to act on it.

The core argument is that AI agents consume the web at a fundamentally different scale than humans — Cadwallader estimates 100x more content per session, eventually 1,000x. That creates demand for a new category of marketing content built for machine consumption, not human readers. Profound now offers what it calls dynamic bot rendering, which detects when an AI answer engine is crawling a site and serves that agent different content from what a human visitor would see. One large CPG customer used the platform to update 40,000 web pages in a week.

“We've raised $180,000,000 from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. We launched the business two years ago with a simple proposition: how does AI talk about my brand? We've seen incredible adoption across a third of the Fortune 100. Some of the biggest brands are now using Profound to actually do their marketing — build the work with agents.”

Profound Ads

The company has quietly launched Profound Ad Studio, which Cadwallader calls an early success. The product lets brands — Ramp is named as a user — create, publish, and measure paid advertising on generative AI platforms, with plans to extend across broader media. The logic is that a single AI agent can sit across all surface areas and deploy media spend dynamically in a way that legacy software never could, because each ad platform previously had too different a shape to manage from one place.

Market scope

Cadwallader argues the relevant customer universe is effectively every brand, not just e-commerce. Whether a company sells consumer electronics, financial services, or B2B software, its buyers are increasingly reaching purchase decisions through AI intermediaries. The comparison to SEO is deliberate but limited — the mechanics of how an answer engine weights content are structurally different from how a search crawler ranked pages.

On agentic commerce specifically, Cadwallader sees personal agents like Muse and Instinct as an inevitable future but not yet mainstream outside of early adopters. His near-term framing is a barbell: agent-optimized marketing matters and is growing fast, but purely human-focused marketing, including physical formats like billboards, continues to command spend.

The positioning bet

Cadwallader frames the company's ambition plainly: build the canonical AI marketing company, the way vertical AI is picking off one industry category at a time. With a third of the Fortune 100 already on the platform and two marquee investors behind it, Profound is moving quickly to own that definition before anyone else does.