Profound, the NYC-based startup redefining how brands show up in AI-generated search results, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from NVentures, Khosla Ventures, Saga VC, South Park Commons, and SV Angel.

The company, co-founded by James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, is building the AI Visibility category - giving brands real-time insight into how they appear in zero-click environments like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews.

Today, more than 60% of consumers begin product research through AI assistants rather than traditional search engines. But those experiences leave no browser trail, no clicks, and no analytics dashboards. Profound is solving that blind spot. Its platform lets brands track what AI says about them, analyze where it pulls information from, and take action to influence those results.

Cadwallader described the shift succinctly, noting that “in a zero-click world, the conversation between consumers and an AI agent is the new first impression.” For brands, that moment is now less about controlling SERP position and more about influencing language, relevance, and credibility as interpreted by machine reasoning.

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Platform Designed for the Post-SEO Era

Profound’s product suite includes four key modules: Answer Engine Insights, which shows what AI says about your brand; Agent Analytics, which reveals how AI scrapers interpret your content; Conversation Explorer, for monitoring trending queries; and Agents, a set of AI tools that suggest strategic changes to improve visibility.

The system now processes more than 100 million AI search queries per month, across 18 countries and six languages, and is already used by enterprise brands like MongoDB, Ramp, Indeed, and US Bank. Clients report 25-40% increases in share-of-voice within the first 60 days.

But Profound’s strategy didn’t come from trying to predict where search would go. It came from seeing what was missing - and then building the interface layer to fix it.

Rather than compete directly with AI assistants or launch another content engine, the team realized the leverage wasn’t in owning the endpoint. It was in offering the dashboard. The moment consumer behavior leapt ahead of existing tooling, Profound stepped into the void and created the map everyone else now navigates by.

This is where the deeper play emerges, especially for founders. When platforms shift faster than companies can react, there’s massive opportunity in providing clarity. Profound didn’t try to dominate a new UX - they built the tooling to observe it. They bet on visibility over control. And that bet now forms the backbone of a fast-growing B2B category.

One founder might try to build the next Perplexity. But Profound asked: what happens after Perplexity becomes the default? Who gets to measure the results? Who tells brands how they’re represented? And that’s precisely where they built.

It’s the same logic that made Stripe so powerful - not by reinventing payments, but by giving developers a clean, reliable interface for it. Profound is applying that same thesis to AI-native brand discovery.

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A Category Being Built in Real Time

The clarity of that vision is a big part of why Kleiner Perkins led the round. Partner Ilya Fushman called Profound “the clear leader in a category that will define modern marketing,” and emphasized that “as the web shifts from pages to AI answers, Profound provides the infrastructure every company will need.”

That investor confidence isn’t just about market timing. It’s about the quality of the product. As one backer noted, Profound “didn’t ask us to change our process. It just started making our process better - until we couldn’t imagine working without it.”

This quote captures something deeper: Profound didn’t position itself as disruptive. It became indispensable. And in infrastructure markets, that’s a much more powerful place to be.

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What’s Ahead for Profound

With the new funding, Profound is doubling down on engineering, scaling its AI data pipeline, expanding multilingual support, and rolling out deeper integrations with search interfaces. It also launched Profound Lite, a $499/month offering aimed at startups and small teams who want visibility into how AI bots describe their product - before they’re left out of the narrative entirely.

Cadwallader believes AI Visibility will soon be as standard a metric as traditional SEO or brand sentiment. “AI visibility has gone mainstream - it’s now a must-have for every brand, big or small,” he said.

The product roadmap includes real-time alerting, customizable dashboards, and benchmarking against competitors - all delivered in a form that teams can act on, not just analyze.

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Positioning for the Next Decade of Marketing

As AI interfaces replace traditional discovery flows, Profound is betting that brands won’t just want to track performance - they’ll need to shape it. Whether it’s a chatbot recommending financial tools or a voice assistant describing product options, the future of marketing isn’t just visual. It’s conversational, predictive, and automated.

And in that world, being left out of the answer is more dangerous than ranking below the fold ever was.

Profound is giving brands the power to step back into that conversation - not by gaming the system, but by understanding it. That’s the kind of clarity every company will need in the AI-native internet.