Marketing technology startup Profound, legally known as Cooper Square Technologies Inc., has secured $180 million in a Series D funding round. The investment brings the company's total valuation to $1.8 billion.
The funding round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Additional participants included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Saga Ventures, Evantic, and South Park Commons.
Profound provides a cloud platform designed to increase brand visibility within AI services like ChatGPT. The software identifies consumer search prompts and helps companies optimize website content to ensure their products are cited more frequently by chatbots.
The platform includes features for monitoring product accuracy in AI responses and analyzing consumer sentiment. It also offers tools for competitor research, including a feature launched in June to compare chatbot advertising campaigns against rival brands.
Earlier this year, the company introduced an automation feature called Aim for planning visibility initiatives, followed by a tool for generating chatbot ads. Profound collects its data from consumer panels using a double opt-in process and filters out personal information.
The company plans to utilize the new capital to customize AI models for marketing applications and develop benchmarks for measuring automation performance. These research efforts aim to enhance the overall capabilities of the Profound platform.
