AI startup Profound—whose tech helps brands monitor and influence their presence in AI search engines like SearchGPT and Perplexity—announced a $3.5 million seed funding round today.
The four-person startup is backed by notable investors such as Keith Rabois, managing director at Khosla Ventures; Saga’s Max Altman, Ben Braverman and Thomson Nguyen; South Park Commons; entrepreneur Scott Belsky; and former CTO of Coinbase and angel investor Balaji Srinivasan.
“How visible and favorable [brands] are in these AI systems is about to become every brand’s hair-on-fire problem,” said co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader. “Our platform shows every company in the world how they show up in this new AI environment, which is where the next billion eyeballs are.”
Nearly 13 million U.S. adults used gen AI-powered tools as their primary way to search online last year, per Statista. This figure is expected to surge to over 90 million by 2027. Perplexity already handles 1 million queries every day, per Fast Company. Even Google, the dominant force in search, has widely rolled out its AI search engine, AI Overview, across the U.S.
Profound taps into AI to analyze thousands, sometimes millions, of queries searched on these AI platforms about a brand, such as its services or product features. The company’s algorithm then synthesizes the data, providing a snapshot of how the AI systems portray the brand, and its competitors, identifying the sources of content used by these platforms.
For example, when running 100,000+ queries about the competitive attributes between the performance of two well-known pickup trucks on ChatGPT over the last 30 days, Profound pinpointed how the AI presents comparative data on aspects like torque and towing capacity. Profound scores the attributes from very good to very bad.
In the example above, Profound found that the pickup truck in blue has higher towing and payload capacity than the competitor in red, per ChatGPT’s answers from sources such as cars.com wheelsjoint.com.
By partnering with key websites and creating content on their owned and operated channels, brands can influence the AI-generated results that shape consumer perceptions and drive purchasing decisions, said Cadwallader.
