Artificial intelligence discovery monitoring platform company Profound today announced that it had raised $96 million in new funding on a $1 billion valuation to expand its AI visibility monitoring and automation platform to support greater enterprise usage and to accelerate development of its analytics and AI-driven workflow capabilities.

Founded in 2024, Profound offers software that is designed to help brands monitor and manage how they are represented within AI-generated responses and autonomous agent outputs.

The company provides infrastructure that tracks how products, services and corporate information are surfaced, summarized and recommended by AI systems. Consumer discovery is increasingly occurring through large language models and AI assistants rather than traditional keyword search. Profound’s platform centers on aggregating AI response data and structuring it for analysis and enabling operational workflows based on that intelligence.

The platform works by programmatically querying multiple AI answer engines and model endpoints to capture structured outputs and analyze references, sentiment and positioning within responses. The outputs are then normalized and stored in a data layer that allows enterprises to measure visibility, frequency of mention and contextual framing across models.

Profound’s system integrates analytics with automation tools to allow users to connect monitoring results to content updates, messaging adjustments and other marketing actions through configurable interfaces.

Key features of the company’s platform include AI visibility tracking, sentiment analysis, competitive benchmarking and reporting dashboards. The platform also supports automated workflows through Profound Agents, agents that execute tasks such as drafting content, updating knowledge sources or triggering internal review cycles based on predefined rules.

Profound Agents, which became generally available today, scale operations on behalf of brands and operate as customizable, autonomous workers that collapse the time between campaign concept and execution. According to Profound, the agents boost the productivity of the modern marketer tenfold.

“Profound Agents expand the product from visibility to autonomous execution, positioning them to define how marketing is done in an agentic world,” said Sachin Patel, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners LP. “They are building the marketing platform for the future of discovery.”

Use cases for Profound’s platform span brand monitoring, product positioning analysis, content optimization and enterprise knowledge management. With those use cases, Profound has found strong traction with more than 10% of the Fortune 500 using its services and more than 700 enterprises across consumer packaged goods, financial services, retail, pharma, consumer tech and business-to-business tech verticals.

Notable Profound customers include Target Corp., Figma Inc., Walmart Inc., Ramp Business Corp., MongoDB Inc., Chime Financial Inc. and U.S. Bancorp.

The Series C funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with existing investors Sequoia Capital Operations, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Saga VC, South Park Commons and Evantic also participating. The new funding takes the total raised by Profound to $155 million.

Photo: Profound