Profound Secures $35 Million in Series B Funding to Leverage AEO to Influence Consumers in a Controlled Manner for Brands in the AI Era

AI is revolutionizing the way people access information. In the Internet era, people obtain fresh information from search engines and social media to figure out what they like and what they want to buy. Brand owners also reach and influence users and consumers through methods such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and "influencer recommendations" on social media.

However, in the AI era, both C - end and B - end users are interacting with various AI assistants and agents, and are using traditional information access channels less and less.

The weekly active user count of ChatGPT has exceeded 700 million; Perplexity has just received a $200 million Series D financing, with a monthly query volume of over 780 million times. Chatbots like ChatGPT and AI search engine applications are becoming new traffic entrances.

Previously, we introduced You.com and Exa, search engines specifically designed for AI. There have also been significant changes in the technology and products of search engines.

Obviously, there has been a paradigm - shift in the way people access information, which will completely transform the marketing industry. In the face of this change, a new generation of marketing technology companies will emerge to assist brand owners. For example, Profound is a marketing optimization tool specifically designed for search engines in the AI era.

Recently, Profound received a $35 million Series B financing led by Sequoia Capital. Co - investors include Kleiner Perkins (the lead investor in Series A), Khosla Ventures (the lead investor in the seed round), Saga VC, and South Park Commons. The total financing of Profound has reached $58.5 million. Just in June 2025, it received a $20 million Series A financing. The short interval between the two rounds of financing clearly shows that its growth rate and the degree of acceptance by customers have enabled these well - known investment institutions to make quick decisions.

The traffic entrance is changing. If marketing methods don't iterate, they will be eliminated

Profound was co - founded by James Cadwallader (CEO) and Dylan Babbs (CTO). Profound's team has also attracted former employees from AMD, Microsoft, Datadog, Uber, Bridgewater, and OpenAI.

The founding team of Profound (Source: Sequoia Capital)

James Cadwallader was the co - founder of Kyra, a data - driven influencer marketing agency. This experience gave him in - depth cooperation experience with Fortune 500 brands. During the entrepreneurship process of Kyra, he keenly perceived the huge challenges and opportunities that brands face in emerging AI channels: Nike spends $4 billion on marketing every year, but if you ask ChatGPT which running shoes are good, it will give four or five suggestions, which may not necessarily include Nike running shoes.

Now, AI assistants and AI searches don't list a series of ranked links. Instead, based on their "cognition" of brands, they generate a single, authoritative, and probability - based answer.

The influence of traffic, backlinks, and click - through rates, which were crucial in traditional search engine optimization (SEO), has been greatly weakened.

Gartner predicts that "by 2028, as consumers embrace search driven by generative AI, the organic search traffic of brands will decrease by 50% or more." According to a survey by Profound, 60% of consumers now turn to AI assistants first, rather than traditional search engines, for product research.

Now, the traffic entrances are iterating, the people using these traffic entrances are iterating, and the brand awareness of these new - generation consumers will also iterate.

For brand owners, if their marketing methods don't iterate accordingly, they are likely to be eliminated.

Build an AEO platform to make brand owners visible again and have a controllable influence on consumers

The pain point for brand companies in the AI era is that they have no insight into how AI tools evaluate their brands and have no way to exert influence.

Profound is an AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) platform. Its fundamental goal is to ensure that when users ask questions on any AI platform (whether it's Google's featured snippets or AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity), the content of brand owners can be directly adopted and presented to users as a trustworthy and authoritative answer.

Specifically, Profound's products can be mainly divided into three categories according to their functions: monitoring, creation, and event coordination.

The monitoring - type products mainly solve the problem of the "visibility black box" of brands in AI search engines, making brands more aware of how AI introduces and displays them.

For example, Answer Engine Insights, which is the core monitoring dashboard of the platform, can display in real - time how major mainstream AI search engines describe the brands, products, industries, and competitors of enterprise customers.

There is also Agent Analytics, which is specifically used to identify and analyze AI crawlers accessing an enterprise's own website. It can accurately show which AI platforms are crawling the enterprise's website, the crawling frequency, and which pages they are most interested in.

The page of Agent Analytics (Source: Profound)

Finally, there is Conversation Explorer, which can help enterprises discover what types of AI conversations users are having around their industries and products, and uncover emerging hot topics and deep - seated user intentions. Its sub - functions include batch keyword analysis and keyword hierarchy.

After knowing how AI search engines introduce and display an enterprise's products, the next step for enterprises is to transform the monitored insights into actual actions and actively shape and optimize their narratives in AI.

The page of Profound Actions (Source: P)

Profound Actions integrates all monitoring data, identifies high - impact content opportunities, and includes two core functions.

Data - driven content creation brief: Generate a detailed "action plan" for the human marketing team, including suggested topics, title structures, factual data to be cited, etc., to ensure that the created content precisely meets AI preferences.

AEO content creation template: Directly transform insights into complete content (such as blog posts, comparison guides, etc.) that can be published at any time and is built based on successful paradigms.

This tool transforms content creation for AI search engines from guesswork into a science supported by data and solves the problems of content production efficiency and scalability.

In the past, planning and executing a large - scale marketing event required a huge amount of time and manpower. Now, Profound's platform allows a small team to use multiple agents to plan a marketing event in minutes that used to take months to prepare.

Currently, Profound offers two pricing methods for customers of different sizes. Large enterprises can use its customized Profound Enterprise plan to meet their complex needs; while startups and small enterprises can choose Profound Lite, a self - service plan priced at $499 per month, aiming to enable all enterprises to have AI exposure.

Profound has attracted a wide range of customers from more than 500 organizations, including not only Fortune 10 enterprises and large banks (such as U.S. Bank), but also many top - tier technology companies in the AI era, such as Ramp, MongoDB, DocuSign, Plaid, and Clay.

Taking the fintech unicorn Ramp as an example, after using Profound's platform, the brand exposure of its accounts payable product in AI channels increased by 7 times.

Under the transformation of the marketing paradigm, entrepreneurs with a global vision will establish a new generation of AI marketing companies

The online advertising model is the core business model of the previous generation of Internet giants. Whether it's Meta or Google, the vast majority of their revenue still comes from online advertising. Their moats come from network effects, rooted in their occupation of the traffic entrances of Internet users.

However, when AI - native applications (think about ChatGPT's 700 million weekly active users) show the potential to become traffic entrances, traditional Internet giants may be disrupted. For example, Google, which already has a powerful Gemini series of models and Google Search as its core entrance, is still hesitant about the AI transformation of traditional Google Search because the revenue from traditional search is something they dare not and cannot abandon.

The change in traffic entrances will inevitably drive the change in marketing methods. So, the way to make brands more visible has changed from SEO to AEO. Of course, in the AI era, marketing itself is a popular direction. However, the previous thinking was mainly focused on materials, specifically using AI to generate high - quality materials in various modalities at a lower cost and higher efficiency; but materials that cannot be seen by target users and consumers are obviously worthless.

In the field of AI, China has both world - class AI models and AI application companies that sell products and services globally (whether it's hardware or software). These new - generation companies are facing a huge global market and have a strong marketing demand.

Against the background of the transformation of the marketing paradigm, a new generation of AI marketing companies will be established by outstanding Chinese entrepreneurs, whether their focus is on marketing materials or AEO.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Alpha Commune" (ID: alphastartups), author: One who discovers outstanding entrepreneurs. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.