Marketing technology startup Profound today announced that it has raised $180 million in funding at a $1.8 billion valuation.

Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins jointly led the Series D investment. They were joined by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic and South Park Commons.

Profound, officially Cooper Square Technologies Inc., helps companies boost their visibility in artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT. Its namesake cloud platform identifies the prompts that a brand’s target buyers use to research products. It then identifies ways to increase the frequency with which the brand is mentioned in chatbots’ prompt responses.

An electronics retailer could use Profound to identify the ChatGPT queries that consumers typically use to research smartwatches. The platform can bring up the most popular prompts from the past week. It also identifies patterns in those prompts. Profound might, for example, point out that smartwatch-related ChatGPT prompts often focus on devices’ health tracking features. 

Companies can use the information that Profound surfaces to more closely align their website content with users’ AI prompts. That increased relevance, in turn, leads chatbots to cite their content more often.

Profound says that its platform also eases several related tasks. Companies can use the software to check whether AI prompt responses describe their products accurately. Additionally, Profound measures consumer sentiment around each of a brand’s offerings to identify weak points.

Competitor research is another task that the platform promises to speed up. Profound helps brands find prompts that cause AI tools to mention rivals. In June, it launched a tool that measures how a brand’s chatbot ads stack up against competitors’ campaigns. 

Profound sources its prompt data from consumer panels, groups of users who share their AI queries with market researchers. Participants complete what the company describes as a double opt-in process before their information is collected. For added measure, Profound filters prompts that contain personal data.

The platform can not only flag areas for improvement in a company’s marketing efforts but also automate some of the associated work. Earlier this year, Profound debuted a feature called Aim that autonomously plans AI visibility initiatives. The company subsequently launched a tool that can automatically generate chatbot ads.

“Profound started as an analytics platform for marketers to understand how buyers discover their brands through AI,” said Profound co-founder and Chief Executive James Cadwallader. “Today, they’re using our Agents to research, write and report.”

Profound will use its newly raised capital to post-train, or customize, AI models for marketing use cases. It will also develop a benchmark for measuring how well the models automate those use cases. Profound expects the research push to produce technologies that will enhance its platform’s capabilities.

Image: Profound