companies

Profound

Answer Engine Optimization platform that tracks how brands are mentioned, cited, and ranked inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI search tools.

Profound was founded in August 2024 by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, who met through South Park Commons in San Francisco, on the premise that as consumers shift from typed search queries to conversational AI answers, brands need a way to see how those systems describe them - there's no ranking page to check, no analytics pixel, and no guarantee the same question gets the same answer twice. The company built a system that runs a brand's key questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, and Google AI Overviews on a recurring basis and stores each answer as a snapshot, tracking whether the brand was mentioned, where, and which sources the model cited. Growth has been fast even by AI-startup standards: after a Series A and Series B, Profound closed a $96 million Series C in February 2026 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins participating, reportedly valuing the company near $1 billion less than eighteen months after founding. Customers cited publicly include Fortune 10 companies, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and Indeed. The company is headquartered in New York with additional offices in San Francisco, London, and Buenos Aires, and its product line now extends past monitoring into agents that draft AEO-optimized FAQ content and prioritize which pages or citations to chase next.

Founded

2024

Headquarters

New York, United States

Sector

applications