Profound

Dev platform Series D+ (opens in a new tab) tryprofound.com (opens in a new tab) · in/tryprofound (opens in a new tab) · @profound (opens in a new tab)

Profound sells answer-engine optimisation tooling: visibility in AI answers, the prompts people actually ask, agent-built marketing workflows and analytics on how AI crawlers hit a site. It is bought by SEO, content, PR and agency teams.

##signals 08

September 2026
- Profound raises $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-16 Funding tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound raised a $180M Series D led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.8B valuation.
- Answer engines change what they recommend based on who's asking (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-11 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound tested ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini across 71,147 responses, prepending persona details.
- Study finds AI answers rarely cite a company's own pricing page (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-05 tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Growth Unhinged and Profound sampled 7,600 AI responses to pricing questions about Cloud 100 companies.
- Ships a context layer to stop its tools giving generic answers (opens in a new tab)
  
  09-02 Release tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound launched Context Manager, a store for brand, market and offering details that its AI Marketer.
August 2026
- Claude and Claude Code behave as two answer engines, not one (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-25 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Its ten-day observational study of 24,135 responses across 1,724 prompts finds Claude Code invokes web.
- Ships a YouTube citation breakdown for answer engines (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-20 Release tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound added YouTube Citation Breakdown to its Answer Engine Insights product.
- Finds pricing pages are where answer engines err most (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-20 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound analyzed over 158,000 brand claims made by AI answer engines and found 4.3% to 6.8%.
- Measures commercial ChatGPT conversations more than doubling (opens in a new tab)
  
  08-19 News tryprofound.com ↗ (opens in a new tab)
  
  Profound analyzed 7.5 million English-language US ChatGPT conversations over a year.