Exclusive: Profound raises $35M as Sequoia backs its ambitious bid to become the Salesforce of AI search

Since launching less than a year ago, the New York City-based company has signed Fortune 10 clients and hundreds more, though it could publicly name only a few, including Ramp, US Bank, Indeed, MongoDB, DocuSign, and Chime. Profound says 2,000 marketers from over 500 organizations now use its platform daily as brands race to secure their place in the AI-first internet. And the race is heating up: according to the Wall Street Journal, AI-powered chatbots now account for more than 5% of U.S. desktop search traffic—up from just 1.3% in early 2024.

Sequoia partner Anas Biad told Fortune the firm’s big bet is on cofounders James Cadwallader, a serial marketing entrepreneur, and Dylan Potts, a former Uber designer. The two met at South Park Commons, a San Francisco community and early-stage fund founded in 2016 by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s first female engineer, and Aditya Agarwal, former Dropbox CTO. Sequoia views the rise of AI search as a once-in-a-generation platform shift for marketers—one it believes Profound is poised to lead by helping brands monitor how they and their competitors surface in AI-generated results and produce new content to keep pace.

“Their speed of execution was truly remarkable—in both the product they built and the customers they landed,” said Biad. “We only back founders who want to build generational companies. Their team is very ambitious and very aggressive.”

Cadwallader, who previously founded influencer marketing firm Kyra, has called the change a “Game of Thrones power shift” from decades of search engine optimization tactics to a new world of AI search. He said he became “obsessed” with Perplexity in early 2024. “It was so obvious to me that this was an inflection point—once you’ve used AI to search, you quickly understand why our children won’t be using [Google’s] blue links.”

But the shift is bigger than search, he emphasized: it will change the internet itself and become a boardroom-level problem for every marketer. If AI chatbots become the primary way people search, brands will lose direct visibility and control over how they appear to consumers online. That’s not just a marketing issue, he explained—it’s a business challenge that touches revenue, customer acquisition, competitive positioning, and brand identity.

Tackling it, he said, means more than monitoring AI output. It requires creating and optimizing content for a new audience: the bots themselves. “This is the first time ever you are creating content for bots,” said Cadwallader. “Brands are using Profound to create what humans would probably find boring—highly structured content that’s designed for bots to consume, like a game of telephone.”

Profound tracks how major AI models—from ChatGPT, Grok, and Meta’s LLaMA to Google’s Gemini and Microsoft Copilot—surface brand mentions. The company is adding DeepSeek next week. “We see huge differences across models, and that changes week over week or month over month,” Cadwallader said. “It’s almost like tracking a new species.”

The platform then uses advanced reasoning models, such as OpenAI’s o3 (and now GPT-5), to analyze those insights and generate recommendations, from gap analyses to suggested copy. Those recommendations might involve creating new content, optimizing web pages, producing social posts, or even targeting media outlets influencing AI-generated answers. “There will always be a human in the loop—it’s not about replacing marketers,” Cadwallader said. “But what used to take a team of ten, you can now do entirely within Profound.”

The challenge has already expanded beyond marketing. “It’s become a PR challenge, a content challenge, even a customer support challenge,” he said. “The models have opinions, and they reflect the internet’s opinions back to users.”

That makes Profound’s ambitions far bigger than SEO. Cadwallader envisions a future where transactions happen directly inside AI assistants—without a single click away—posing competitive threats even to giants like Amazon. “I’m inspired by Salesforce,” he said, pointing to the company’s early-2000s cloud software disruption. “It’s an example of just how big you can go.”