Should you join: Profound

Inside the hot AI marketing startup unlocking a new path to revenue for companies.

✨ Hey there - this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter. This is part of our series Should You Join, where we go behind the scenes on interesting companies. Our hope is that documenting these sorts of details, which never really make it to big publication press releases, can help you a) discover more interesting opportunities and b) inspire you to think creatively (for any of your own endeavors). You can join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here.

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A long time ago, in a long-forgotten corner of the planet, there was a peaceful village inhabited by peaceful people. They lived a quiet life: fishing, dancing, hunting, cooking.

One day, a new being came to the village. This was the first time anyone new had ever come to the village. This person, if you could call them a person, introduced themselves as The Oracle. They looked a lot different from the villagers, and talked differently too, and many of the villagers were skeptical. Some even voted to have The Oracle banished.

But as the months went on, the villagers realized that The Oracle was actually quite powerful. It was extremely intelligent, at least in some ways. It had capabilities the villagers did not. The villagers began to build trust in The Oracle. They gave it more power. Like the power to do their work for them, and the power to run things.

Centuries passed. The village grew into a civilization. And then something strange started to happen, something that would shape the entire economy: people relied on The Oracle to decide which products to buy. This new shift was concerning for many companies.

They started asking…

• How do we get The Oracle to recommend our products?, and…

• Where does The Oracle even get its information?, and…

• Do we need an entirely new approach to marketing in this version of the world?

These are essentially the questions that Profound, today’s spotlighted startup, exists to answer. The Oracle in the story is AI, and it is quickly becoming one of the main ways people get information. AI is also quickly becoming one of the main ways marketers do their work.

Which means that Profound, which provides the marketing tools for this new world, is interesting. Being a near-direct pipeline to revenue is usually a pretty good bet, which perhaps explains why Profound has grown so fast and raised a $96M Series C this year.

So I wanted to dive deeper. What are they building? Why do they believe they will win? What kinds of people thrive there? And: Should you join?

The product

It is not always easy to describe how a software product helps its customers make more revenue (sometimes you have to draw a 17-step chart). But with Profound, it is easy: Profound helps companies make more revenue by giving them the tools to understand, control, and scale AI marketing. In other words, Profound gets AI to talk about your company (among other things).

This new category is called AEO: Answer Engine Optimization.

In the past, companies used tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to dominate a similar domain (Search Engine Optimization). These tools helped you analyze your company’s ranking on search engines, like Google, and helped you strategize about ways to rank higher. None of them were nearly as ambitious as what Profound is building, but they are a helpful analog.

The issue with SEO tools—with any tools pre-Profound—is that they are not built for people chatting with AI. The best practices are different. Claude is not Google Search. Tracking and optimizing your company’s performance on Google and in AI conversations is a completely different game; it is a kind of game that requires completely new tools. And the exciting piece is that AI search may be on track to become much bigger than SEO ever was.

Today, companies mostly use Profound in two ways: to track their AI search performance (which Profound calls ‘Monitor’) and to optimize it (which Profound calls ‘Create’). Those categories are rather self-explanatory—the tracking tools help you keep tabs on your performance, and the optimizing tools help you do things that increase your performance.

So the basic flow for a customer (like Ramp) is something like this:

1. Sign up for Profound.

2. Figure out how your brand is doing today; a vitals check of sorts.

3. Learn what steps need to be taken to perform even better.

4. Use Profound’s AI Agents to execute on those steps.

5. Perform better, make more money, and so on.

Powering much of Profound’s platform are their Agents, which they announced alongside their Series C this year. In the past, Profound gave marketing teams visibility. But, “as customers operationalized that insight, they often had to export Profound data into separate orchestration and automation tools, learning and using multiple systems just to execute.”

With Agents, customers can now do it all with Profound.

Results with Profound (and their Agents) often come fast. Statsig 2x’d their visibility across all key mentions in one week by creating content and getting citations. Zapier became the most-cited domain for their most competitive prompts. Ramp increased visibility on their Accounts Payable solution from 3.2% to 22.2% in one month by publishing targeted content.

Clearly, if someone came to you and told you they could (almost) magically get a trusted entity to recommend your product to a bunch of people… You would say yes. And lots of companies have said yes. Profound is a pretty hot startup these days.

“Hot startup,” however, does not always mean “successful in the long-term.” So how does Profound achieve that? What is the long-term vision?

The strategy

The optimistic view of Profound’s trajectory is that it might be on pace to become the most important marketing tool in the world. This is certainly the view that James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, Profound’s co-founders, take. “The SEO and paid search industry is a $90B market,” they told me. “As discovery shifts from search engines to AI, that spend has to find a new home. Every brand on the planet is going to need to figure out how they show up in this new world of AI search.”

Just like how every company eventually needed Salesforce to manage their customers or HubSpot to manage their marketing, James and Dylan said, companies will need Profound to manage where and how their brand shows up in AI search. In a world where you simply ‘talk to the internet’ to decide what to buy (James believes that in five years, $1T of commerce will be driven by ChatGPT alone), a tool that can help make sure your product(s) are getting recommended becomes extremely valuable.

And extremely valuable is important here. Profound will have to break new ground. Semrush, arguably the most popular SEO tool of the last decade, is currently valued at ~$1.8B on the public market. That’s not bad. But Profound was already valued at $1B as of their Series C; the vision is, and has to be, much larger than the SEO tools that preceded it.

So what does it take for Profound to become the most valuable marketing tool on the planet? For the company to become really big (say, $10B, or $100B, or bigger)? I’d say that this success rests roughly on the following series of events:

1. People increasingly rely on AI for buying decisions (note: 45% already do).

2. Profound cements itself as the best tool for getting AI to talk about your brand.

3. Profound drives ~trillions in revenue for companies and exists as far more than just an AI search tool—rather, it becomes the most important tool marketers use bar none. Powered by Profound’s AI agents, which help marketers get more, better work done.

With Profound driving massive amounts of revenue and sitting at the center of most companies in the world, they would have all kinds of options (related and not related to AI search optimization) to expand their product and further grow revenue.

One advantage is that—though they are not the only startup in the space—Profound has made headway quickly and, to many, established themselves as the go-to product for AI search optimization. But another advantage, and the one they will probably need to rely on most if they are really going to win here, is their team.

“I joined Loom after their Series C,” Nick Lafferty, founding marketer at Profound, said. “Loom was about 300 people and the marketing team was about 30, which included our brand team. Profound is about 170 people and our marketing team is about 8. We are way more efficient as a company and as a team, both due to AI and due to the caliber of people we hire… I can confidently say that I have never worked with such a talent-dense [team] in my career, and I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years now.”

The growth

Profound’s co-founders, James and Dylan, launched Profound together in August of 2024. They raised their seed round from Khosla and Saga VC with just a product demo (no pitch deck).

What followed was one of the more aggressive fundraising trajectories in recent SaaS history (perhaps part of why you may have heard of Profound). In June of 2025, Kleiner Perkins led a $20M Series A. Two months later (!) Sequoia led a $35M Series B. And, in February of this year, Lightspeed led a $96M Series C at an impressive $1B valuation.

What’s fueling all of this? Well, in addition to startups and smaller businesses, Profound now works with over 700 enterprises—including more than 12% of the Fortune 500. The customer list includes names like Target, Walmart, U.S. Bank, and MongoDB. They don’t share ARR publicly, but it’s not hard to do some (rather encouraging) napkin math.

Of course, Profound does not do any of this (none of the growth, none of the fundraising, none of the product) without their team. And so, without further ado…

The team and culture

Imagine you walk into one of Profound’s offices in New York, London, San Francisco, or Buenos Aires and you pick a person at random to talk to. You go up to their desk. Say hello. Within minutes, Sharanya Pogaku (ops) told me, “you would be so impressed by them that you would want to work at Profound and you would want to surround yourself with other people like them.”

That is a bold thing to say. But the people (and the associated energy and culture) were the common thread among the conversations I had with the Profound team. “A lot of people say it’s the team,” Profound’s Head of Marketing Trevor Pyle told me, “but we’ve built a real snowball effect. We’ve hired a few people early who were hungry, ego-less, hard workers… They saw the opportunity, got excited, and then helped us hire more people like that.”

Beyond all of the things you might expect to hear from a startup (we work hard, we ship fast, we take ownership), one theme did surface as unique: an intense focus on effectiveness.

One input to this pursuit of effectiveness is “extreme directness and being aggressive about getting results and working well together,” Trevor said. It’s hard to be honest if you’re tiptoeing around your point with buzzwords and fluff.

Another input is efficiency. “There are no calories wasted hemming and hawing, needing to align people.” Joey Loi, Head of Product said. “Just do it.” Meetings are not a big part of the culture. Nor are vanity metrics and other versions of peacocking. Just urgency and accountability.

Even for new arrivals, work at Profound is intense. On his first week, Joey (product) got straight to the whiteboard and started building with design and engineering. Nick (growth) was vibe coding new parts of the website on day two. Erin Rairdan, a product designer, was dropped into a “high-visibility, high-impact” project on her very first day.

The team at Profound is, above all else, a talented and ambitious group of people who work hard, are very honest, and actually like working with each other. They also like spending time together outside of work:

The Profound team on a ski trip

Should you join Profound?

Besides the technical stuff, like compensation and equity, conversations about whether you should join a company generally come down to two pieces: (1) Do you believe in this company’s ability to realize their grand vision, and (2) Are you the right kind of person to work here?

As for the former, I hope this essay has been useful to set the context for what Profound is and what their product does. But you could also research outside of this piece (and probably should, if you are considering joining somewhere full-time).

How would you research? You could read Profound’s website. Read their competitors’ websites. Brush up on current SEO tools and their offerings. See if you can find a way to talk to any of Profound’s customers—there are many. Interview them about the product (and then, if you want to apply, tell Profound about those findings). You could check out sessions or join an event at Zero Click, Profound’s gathering for AI marketing experts. (Past sessions from Zero Click SF in April are linked.)

Regardless of what you learn, you should probably be somewhat convinced that AI is here to stay and/or will get better in the future; these are upstream of the thesis that people are going to rely on AI for purchasing decisions. And you should be convinced that there is room for Profound to become a significantly more valuable company than they are today.

As for what kind of person you should be? Well, I think you should be an honest person who can take direct feedback and criticism. I think you should be willing to work in the office five days a week. I think you should want to work really hard; one employee told me that even if you’re highly intelligent and skilled, Profound is an especially good fit for people who are “currently in an ambitious period of their lives.”

If you do feel like you fit these criteria, then you may want to check out Profound’s open roles. They are hiring for just about every role you can imagine at their offices in New York, London, San Francisco, and Buenos Aires.

“We don’t care about the perfect resume or the traditional path,” Profound’s co-founders said. If you want to send a cold email (or get even more creative), “do it.”

Thanks to Profound for supporting Next Play and making this Should You Join essay possible.