Shift in Search is a Mega-Trend
The way consumers discover and act on information is undergoing its most important shift in decades…and we are still early. For years, Google’s blue links dominated how we browsed the internet and made purchasing decisions. Today, billions of individuals around the world are turning to multiple AI engines – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok – expecting direct answers rather than a list of websites to click through. Studies showing 56% of searches ending in zero clicks when AI overviews appear, according to SimilarWeb data. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky recently said: “What we see is that traffic that comes from chatbots converts at a higher rate than traffic that comes from Google.” This shift is creating an urgent new paradigm that virtually every marketer and executive is thinking about.
Furthermore, “actions” inside LLMs are accelerating. When a user agent browses the web on a human’s behalf and makes a purchase decision, there is no second chance to win that customer. Businesses must consider user agents as new customers. In the world of traditional search, humans wrote content for humans and could click through multiple options. In a world of agentic commerce, machines will write content for machines, and a single AI recommendation may complete the entire transaction. If brands aren’t surfaced when the agent makes its decision, marketers don’t just lose a click – they lose the sale entirely.
We are thrilled to lead Profound’s Series C as they build the marketing infrastructure for the agentic era of the internet.
Analytics as a Wedge
Great platforms compound value to customers – and they start with a powerful wedge. Profound’s wedge is visibility: giving brands the ability to see how they appear across AI answer engines. The platform tracks brand mentions, analyzes sentiment, benchmarks against competitors, and identifies which sources AI systems cite. Answer engines create a new set of paradigms: fragmented discovery landscape versus single-threaded to Google, re-occurring changes in underlying model characteristics, and more. These shifts make Profound meaningfully more valuable to customers than traditional insights and analytics tools.
This shift is not just constrained to B2C brands…it is much larger as B2B vendor discovery, evaluation, and decisioning is falling into LLMs. Agentic marketing is relevant brand wide, workflows can combine multiple data sources to improve campaigns / results, and the data flywheel can be closed – connecting analytics to creative to outcomes. The pattern is consistent: awareness creates urgency, urgency drives action, and action produces results that compound over time.
As CEO James Cadwallader puts it: “Humans have been creating content for humans. Machines will create content for machines. And when humans need to orchestrate that, they’re going to do it in Profound.”
From Insight to Agents
What got us most excited to lead this round is Profound Agents. Over 500 Profound customers are already using Agents daily. Marketers can now easily build AI Agents to help them with their workflows of creating, publishing, and measuring content.
While measurement is a game-changer for Profound’s customers, the real unlock is action. Profound is closing the loop between analytics, content generation, and attribution – becoming the nucleus of marketing workflows as agents increasingly discover, recommend, and transact on behalf of consumers. Legacy tools were built for a deterministic world of keyword rankings and backlinks. Profound is built for a probabilistic world where how AI systems talk about your brand matters as much as whether you’re mentioned at all.
This is why Profound built Agents: a flexible automation layer that transforms insights into execution. Rather than handing marketers a dashboard and leaving them to figure out what to do next, Agents codify best practices into automated workflows that audit content, identify gaps, generate research-backed briefs, and trigger recommendations – all without routine manual effort.
The shift is massive. Legacy marketing tools were read-only: they showed you data and left the work to humans. Profound is read-write: it sees the opportunity and does the work. The traction speaks for itself.
Customer Love
Profound serves more than 10 percent of the Fortune 500, supporting more than 700 enterprises across CPG, Finserve, Retail, Pharma, Consumer Tech, B2B Tech verticals, including leading brands like Target, Figma, Walmart, Ramp, MongoDB, Chime, and U.S. Bank.
There’s a moment every Profound customer describes: the first time they see how their brand actually appears in AI search. For most, it’s a wake-up call.
The gap between perceived and actual AI visibility is often enormous. Teams with dominant SEO positions discover they’re barely visible in AI responses. Market leaders find themselves outranked by competitors they’d never worried about. One company we spoke with discovered their presence in a core product category – a space they owned in traditional search – was just 3%.
What makes Profound powerful is the speed at which teams can close the gap once they understand it. Leveraging insights about what AI engines actually cite, customers have doubled visibility in a week, increased presence 7x in a month, and leapfrogged competitors who still can’t see what’s happening.
James and Dylan
We believe marketing is entering its most significant platform shift since the introduction of the internet itself, and it takes special founders to capture that opportunity. Every day the market and “what it takes to win” is changing. James and Dylan bring balance of clarity in long term vision and speed in execution amidst a shifting landscape. They are in many ways the perfect complements: James is relentless in his execution and obsessed in his desire to deliver excellence to his customers. We’re convinced Dylan brings top 1% design and engineering from his days at Uber. Together, they have built a culture that rewards slope and recognizes the importance of the moment.
The Road Ahead
Profound is positioned to be the defining marketing company of this new era. They are building the operating system for how brands will engage with the agentic web – where AI assistants increasingly discover, recommend, and transact on behalf of consumers.
When we see founders like James and Dylan going after a massive market with customer love from some of the biggest enterprises in the world, it makes our decision easy.
We could not be more excited to partner with James, Dylan, and the entire Profound team as they build the future of marketing.
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