Profound closed a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation on September 15, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, less than seven months after its $96 million Series C valued the company at $1 billion on February 24. The two-year-old startup, founded in 2024 by chief executive James Cadwallader and chief technology officer Dylan Babbs (a former Uber engineer who met Cadwallader at South Park Commons), has now raised $335 million in total. Revenue tripled over the past six months.

The customer list is the story. Profound reports serving more than 1,000 enterprise brands, up from more than 700 at the Series C, including U.S. Bank, Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, Walmart, Campari Group, Royal Bank of Canada, Zoom, ServiceNow, Ramp, Cursor, MongoDB and Figma. Roughly a third of the Fortune 100 and 16% of the Fortune 500 are now paying to monitor how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity describe them. The platform is built on more than 2 billion real user prompts, and Profound notes an answer engine may draw on roughly 350,000 sources to form an opinion of a single brand. On June 3, Cloudflare reported bot traffic had overtaken human traffic.

Existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons rejoined the round, with Kleiner’s Ilya Fushman and Sequoia’s Anas Biad leading. At the Series C, Profound’s Agents product had over 500 daily users.

The structural read is the one small businesses should notice. Answer-engine optimization is now a funded enterprise category, and the tooling is priced accordingly. Google is already converting local knowledge panels into AI Overviews, BrightonSEO’s 11-million-citation study rewrote the citation playbook this week, and Google’s AI search visibility reports are live for every business site. LemonLime works the same surface, at $999 per month, without a dedicated operator.

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