Profound

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.

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

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

• Answer engine optimization
• AI search analytics
• Prompt intelligence platform
• AI visibility monitoring
• Generative engine optimization

Headquarters

HQ city

New York

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices4 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations

Revenue model

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels10 records

Core 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

Named customers23 records

Segments7 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration23 records

AI capability12 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

19 partnerships are on record, tiered flagship, strategic and core.

• Jordan Digital Marketing (JDM)flagshipChannel Partner/ Reseller/ Distributor · 19 May 2026One 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 or Co-development Partner · 12 March 2026Strategic 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 ZstrategicGTM or Marketing Partner · 3 March 2026Co-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.
• G2flagshipGTM or Marketing Partner · 11 September 2025Power 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.
• NotifiedstrategicTechnology or Integration · 28 August 2025Exclusive 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.
• SpotlightcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 31 July 2025Partnership redefining how B2B technology brands influence AI search, integrating Spotlight's B2B capabilities with Profound's AI visibility platform.
• AmsiveflagshipChannel Partner/ Reseller/ Distributor · 23 June 2025Expanded its SEO services with Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) through a partnership with Profound to enhance brand visibility in AI-driven search.
• RedditstrategicStrategic or Co-development PartnerCollaboration 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.
• CloudflareflagshipTechnology or IntegrationNative integration via Cloudflare Worker (lightweight worker) and Logpush for forwarding CDN logs into Profound's Agent Analytics; supports enterprise-grade AI crawler monitoring.
• VercelflagshipTechnology or IntegrationNative 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 CloudFrontcoreTechnology or IntegrationIntegration via Amazon Data Firehose to deliver real-time logs to Profound's Agent Analytics for AI crawler visibility.
• FastlycoreTechnology or IntegrationCustom HTTPS Endpoint integration to connect Fastly traffic to Profound for AI crawler and bot analytics.
• NetlifycoreTechnology or IntegrationLog Drains integration to connect Netlify traffic into Profound's Agent Analytics.
• AkamaicoreTechnology or IntegrationDataStream2 integration to connect Akamai traffic into Profound for AI crawler monitoring and visibility analytics.
• Google Cloud CDNcoreTechnology or IntegrationLog sink integration to forward Google Cloud CDN traffic into Profound's Agent Analytics.
• WordPresscoreTechnology or IntegrationNative WordPress plugin to send request logs to Profound for AI crawler analytics and visibility tracking.
• ShopifycoreTechnology or IntegrationMultiple Shopify integration options to send request logs to Profound for AI crawler and commerce visibility.
• Adobe Experience ManagercoreTechnology or IntegrationLog Forwarding integration to send AEM as a Cloud Service CDN logs to Profound's Agent Analytics.
• PerplexitystrategicTechnology or IntegrationProfound 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

Direct 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

• Xx.com/tryprofound
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/tryprofound

Compliance5 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles4 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds5 records

Investors9 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Profound