Profound
Profound is an AI visibility and content optimization platform that helps brands monitor and shape their representation across generative AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, serving 700+ enterprise customers including 10%+ of the Fortune 500.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2024
- HeadquartersNew York, United States
- Headcount251–500
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Profound does
Profound is an AI visibility and content optimization platform founded in August 2024 in New York City by James Cadwallader (CEO) and Dylan Babbs (CTO) under the legal entity Cooper Square Technologies, Inc. The platform helps brands monitor, analyze, and shape how they are represented across generative AI answer engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews/AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek. Its three core measurement modules are Answer Engine Insights (browser-captured brand visibility and share-of-voice data), Prompt Volumes (a licensed dataset of 1.3B+ double-opt-in, GDPR/CCPA-compliant real user conversations spanning 10 countries and 30+ languages, growing by ~150M prompts monthly), and Agent Analytics (CDN-level infrastructure monitoring of AI crawler behavior and AI-referred traffic via integrations with Cloudflare, Vercel, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Netlify, Akamai, GCP, WordPress, Shopify, and Adobe Experience Manager). On top of this measurement layer, Profound offers Profound Workflows (no-code automation) and Profound Agents (autonomous AI workers with a drag-and-drop builder) for AEO-optimized content creation, campaign execution, and reporting, plus a Shopping Analysis module for AI commerce visibility.
The company operates a hybrid go-to-market combining demo-led enterprise sales, a self-serve Lite PLG tier (~USD 499/month), a free AEO Report lead magnet, an Agency Partner channel program (Amsive, Jordan Digital Marketing, Rocket55), and global event distribution (Zero Click conference series, SXSW and Cannes Lions workshops). It serves 700+ enterprise customers including 10%+ of the Fortune 500 across CPG, Retail, Financial Services, Pharma, Consumer Tech, and B2B Tech verticals, with named customers including Target, Walmart, Figma, MongoDB, Ramp, U.S. Bank, Chime, DocuSign, Calendly, Vercel, and Indeed. Enterprise pricing starts at USD 2,000+/month and is custom-quoted based on volume, regions, languages, and required agents. Profound has raised more than USD 155M across four funding rounds (Seed from Khosla Ventures in August 2024, USD 20M Series A from Kleiner Perkins in June 2025, USD 35M Series B from Sequoia in August 2025, and USD 96M Series C from Lightspeed at a USD 1B valuation in February 2026) and holds SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance certifications, with offices in NYC, San Francisco, London, and Buenos Aires.
Profound firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Profound
- Legal name
- Cooper Square Technologies, Inc.
- Website
- https://tryprofound.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2024
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 251–500 employees
- Short description
- Profound is an AI visibility and content optimization platform that helps brands monitor and shape their representation across generative AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, serving 700+ enterprise customers including 10%+ of the Fortune 500.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Profound industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Software Platform
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (5132), Software Publishers (513210)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Prompt Engineering, Orchestration & LLMOps Tooling (HDAAACAD)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- AI Application Enablement Platforms (Copilot/Agent Frameworks, SDKs) (HDAEANAJ), Augmented Analytics & AI-Assisted BI (NLQ/NLG, Insights) (HDAEAMAD), End-to-End Enterprise AI Platforms (MLOps & Model Lifecycle Management) (HDAEANAA)
Keywords
Where Profound is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- New York
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices4 records
Markets served
Profound business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations
Revenue model
- Subscription SaaS: Recurring SaaS subscriptions across multiple tiers (Lite, Growth, Enterprise); annual and multi-year contracts available with enterprise pricing quoted based on volume, regions, languages, and required agents.
- Enterprise contracts: Large multi-year enterprise agreements with Fortune 500 and global brands such as Target, Walmart, Figma, MongoDB, Ramp, U.S. Bank, Chime, DocuSign; includes dedicated engagement manager, AI strategist, and Profound University enablement.
- Agency Partner Program: Channel revenue from Profound Partners program where agencies resell and deliver AEO services on the Profound platform; Jordan Digital Marketing and Amsive among first agency partners.
- Strategic partnerships / outcome economics: Outcome-based revenue from strategic collaborations such as the Partnerize VantagePoint Fractional Commission Standard integration enabling AI discovery intelligence tied to verified revenue outcomes in zero-click commerce.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Monthly | Profound Lite — entry-level plan for smaller teams and startups |
| Subscription | Monthly | Growth tier for mid-market brands |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise tier for Fortune 500 and regulated industries |
| Subscription | Monthly | Regional / mid-tier subscription for Australia and Hong Kong coverage |
| Subscription | Monthly | Standard SaaS subscription |
| Freemium | Pay-as-you-go | Free AEO Report (lead magnet) |
Go-to-market motion1 record
Distribution channels5 records
Marketing channels10 records
Profound product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Profound is a software platform that helps brands understand, analyze, build, and measure their visibility across generative AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek. The platform combines a proprietary dataset of 1.3B+ real consumer prompts, browser-captured answer engine monitoring, CDN-level AI crawler analytics, and autonomous AI Agents that generate and optimize AEO content for marketing teams.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Profound Agents: Customizable, autonomous AI workers that handle content creation, campaign execution, AEO-optimized FAQs, AI trend monitoring, PR, and reporting inside the Profound platform.
- Profound Workflows
- Profound University
- Profound Ecosystem
- Zero Click
Products and services
- Answer Engine Insights (AEI) Core monitoring module that tracks how AI answer engines mention, rank, and describe a brand. Shows share of voice, citation sources, sentiment, query fanouts, and competitive comparison across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews/AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek, with responses captured directly from the consumer browser experience. Sold to enterprise brands, agencies, and B2B SaaS companies for AEO strategy and competitive benchmarking.
- Prompt Volumes and Conversation Explorer Core data module providing a dataset of over 1.3 billion real, double-opt-in, GDPR/CCPA-compliant user conversations, updated weekly, that reveals what customers are actually asking AI assistants. Includes conversation intent, keyword hierarchies, query trends, and breakdowns by region, age, income, and platform. Sold to marketing, content, and product teams to align strategy with real AI demand.
- Agent Analytics Core analytics module that provides infrastructure-level monitoring of AI crawler and bot behavior and AI-referred traffic, built on CDN log integrations with Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Netlify, Akamai, GCP, plus WordPress, Shopify, and Adobe Experience Manager. Shows which pages AI crawlers visit, how often they return, and the traffic/conversions referred from AI search. Sold to enterprise brands and B2B SaaS companies that need attribution that traditional analytics tools like GA4 miss.
- Shopping Analysis Standalone feature module that provides retailers with insights into how AI assistants surface, recommend, and rank products in shopping conversations. Captures product images, placement, attributes, response data, and competitive positioning so retailers can see and improve their presence in AI-assisted buying journeys, including unprompted product recommendations in ChatGPT. Sold to retail, CPG, and e-commerce brands.
- Profound Agents Core execution module of customizable, autonomous AI workers that handle content creation, campaign execution, AEO-optimized FAQ generation, AI trend monitoring, PR, and reporting. Built natively on Profound's AI visibility data, with a drag-and-drop node-based builder, conditionals, iterations, and Sheets for orchestration. Sold to enterprise marketing teams, agencies, and B2B SaaS companies to operationalize AEO at scale.
- Profound Workflows Core automation module providing a no-code platform that centralizes AEO research, content auditing, competitive analysis, performance reporting, and content creation. Leverages Profound's prompt volumes, AI visibility, and citation data to automate high-impact marketing tasks at scale via drag-and-drop Agents builder with Prompt LLM, Web Page Scrape, Iteration, and Perplexity Search nodes. Sold to marketing, content, and growth teams.
Quantifiable outcome
- Ramp increased AI visibility 7x in a single month
- +5 more outcomes
Companies that use Profound
Customer profileNamed customers23 records
Segments7 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Profound technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration23 records
AI capability12 records
Feature8 records
Profound partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
19 partnerships are on record, tiered flagship, strategic and core.
- Jordan Digital Marketing (JDM)flagshipOne of the first three Profound Partner agencies; delivers Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) services across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, and Claude. Achieved a 50% visibility increase across LLM-driven platforms and 144% YoY growth in AI-driven website sessions for a pharmaceutical client.
- PartnerizeflagshipStrategic collaboration to integrate VantagePoint Fractional Commission Standard™ into Profound's AI marketing platform, creating a unified system for measuring, verifying, and compensating brand influence in AI-driven discovery and zero-click commerce.
- Avenue ZstrategicCo-lead a featured workshop at SXSW 2026 debuting the industry's first live AEO Brand Audit; integrates Profound's proprietary AEO Audit technology with Avenue Z's AI Search Optimization solution.
- G2flagshipPower B2B software companies' AEO and AI search marketing strategies by integrating Profound's data into G2 dashboards, enabling brands to track and optimize visibility in AI search platforms.
- NotifiedstrategicExclusive partnership integrating Profound's AI-visibility technology into Notified's GlobeNewswire Analytics, enabling PR and IR teams to monitor press release citations by AI platforms; offered to clients free in late Q3 2025.
- SpotlightcorePartnership redefining how B2B technology brands influence AI search, integrating Spotlight's B2B capabilities with Profound's AI visibility platform.
- AmsiveflagshipExpanded its SEO services with Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) through a partnership with Profound to enhance brand visibility in AI-driven search.
- RedditstrategicCollaboration analyzing over 4 billion AI citations and 300 million answer engine responses from August 2024 to late October 2025 to research Reddit's role as the most-cited source across AI platforms.
- CloudflareflagshipNative integration via Cloudflare Worker (lightweight worker) and Logpush for forwarding CDN logs into Profound's Agent Analytics; supports enterprise-grade AI crawler monitoring.
- VercelflagshipNative integration via Vercel Connectable Account enabling Agent Analytics setup in just a few clicks. Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch publicly attests that ChatGPT refers 10% of new signups via Profound's AI visibility insights.
- Amazon CloudFrontcoreIntegration via Amazon Data Firehose to deliver real-time logs to Profound's Agent Analytics for AI crawler visibility.
- FastlycoreCustom HTTPS Endpoint integration to connect Fastly traffic to Profound for AI crawler and bot analytics.
- NetlifycoreLog Drains integration to connect Netlify traffic into Profound's Agent Analytics.
- AkamaicoreDataStream2 integration to connect Akamai traffic into Profound for AI crawler monitoring and visibility analytics.
- Google Cloud CDNcoreLog sink integration to forward Google Cloud CDN traffic into Profound's Agent Analytics.
- WordPresscoreNative WordPress plugin to send request logs to Profound for AI crawler analytics and visibility tracking.
- ShopifycoreMultiple Shopify integration options to send request logs to Profound for AI crawler and commerce visibility.
- Adobe Experience ManagercoreLog Forwarding integration to send AEM as a Cloud Service CDN logs to Profound's Agent Analytics.
- PerplexitystrategicProfound Agents includes a built-in Perplexity Search node enabling FAQ research and conversational content generation powered by Perplexity's answer engine.
Scale indicators9 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights8 records
Profound competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Evertune: Direct AEO platform competitor explicitly benchmarked by Profound (Profound vs Evertune article). Both target brands seeking AI search visibility, share-of-voice, and citation tracking across generative engines, with Evertune relying on API-based querying and a smaller 25M consumer panel versus Profound's 1.3B+ prompt dataset.
- Bluefish AI: Direct AEO competitor profiled in Profound's competitive comparisons (Profound vs Bluefish). Both offer AI brand visibility and citation tracking for enterprise marketers, with overlap in monitoring ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude responses — Profound differentiates via front-end browser querying and SOC 2 Type II / HIPAA readiness.
- Scrunch AI: Direct AEO competitor explicitly compared in Profound's 'Profound vs Scrunch' content. Both provide generative-engine monitoring and citation analytics for marketing teams; Profound positions its edge around a larger real-user prompt dataset, an execution layer via Profound Agents, and CDN-level attribution.
Emerging players
- Otterly AI: Emerging AEO/Search Generative Experience monitoring tool offering brand visibility, sentiment, and citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Targets a similar mid-market and agency buyer to Profound Lite but with narrower coverage and a less developed execution layer.
- Peec AI: Berlin-based AEO analytics platform tracking brand performance across AI search engines. Competes with Profound in European markets on prompt monitoring and share-of-voice reporting; differentiated by regional focus rather than enterprise compliance or agentic execution.
- AthenaHQ: Emerging AI search optimization and analytics platform targeting marketing leaders and agencies. Overlaps with Profound on AI visibility monitoring and content recommendations, but with a narrower enterprise feature set and less mature data assets.
Broad incumbents
- Semrush: Established SEO and content marketing platform that has expanded into AI search visibility features and is priced head-to-head with Profound in regional tiers. Brings massive existing SEO customer base, content workflow integrations, and distribution that Profound must compete against for marketing budgets.
- Ahrefs: Incumbent SEO and content platform expanding into AI search analytics. Comparable as a content-marketing intelligence platform with overlapping buyer (SEO/AEO teams) and analytics depth, but historically web-search-centric rather than answer-engine-centric like Profound.
- BrightEdge: Enterprise SEO and content performance platform with deep Fortune 500 distribution. Comparable as an enterprise marketing intelligence vendor serving large content and SEO teams, and a likely incumbent Profound must displace inside procurement-driven enterprises.
- Conductor: Enterprise SEO and content optimization platform with a strong footprint among Fortune 500 marketing teams. Comparable buyer (enterprise content/SEO leadership) and overlapping workflow tooling, positioning Conductor as a channel-conflict incumbent for Profound's enterprise sales motion.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat7 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Profound social profiles
Digital presenceProfound compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance5 records
Profound financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Profound leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles4 records
Profound funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds5 records
Investors9 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Profound M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Profound
What does Profound do?
Profound is a software platform that helps brands understand, analyze, build, and measure their visibility across generative AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek. The platform combines a proprietary dataset of 1.3B+ real consumer prompts, browser-captured answer engine monitoring, CDN-level AI crawler analytics, and autonomous AI Agents that generate and optimize AEO content for marketing teams.
Is Profound a public or private company?
Profound is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was Profound founded?
Profound was founded in 2024. It employs 251 to 500 people.
Where is Profound based?
Profound is headquartered in New York, United States, in the North America region.
How does Profound make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Subscription SaaS are the primary driver. The others are enterprise contracts, agency Partner Program and strategic partnerships / outcome economics.
Who are Profound's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Evertune, Bluefish AI and Scrunch AI. Emerging players are Otterly AI, Peec AI and AthenaHQ. Broad incumbents are Semrush, Ahrefs, BrightEdge and Conductor.
Does Profound have an API?
Yes. Profound offers a REST API for programmatic access to platform data, including the Profound External API and Agent Analytics Ingestion API. It also exposes a Profound MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for connecting AI assistants/clients to Profound capabilities, including ProfoundBot and a Sheets Sitemap Importer bot. Authentication is handled via platform user sessions; SDKs are not explicitly published. Webhooks/email/RSS/Slack notifications are available via the Better Stack status page. Developer documentation is at docs.tryprofound.com/introduction.
What industry is Profound in?
Profound's product category is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Software Platform. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAAACAD, Prompt Engineering, Orchestration & LLMOps Tooling, with a secondary code of HDAEANAJ, AI Application Enablement Platforms (Copilot/Agent Frameworks, SDKs). Its NAICS code is 5132 and its SIC code is 7372.