Today, the AI firm Profound announced the closing of a $3.5 million initial fundraising round. Profound’s technology assists brands in tracking and influencing their position in AI search engines such as SearchGPT and Perplexity.
Notable backers include businessman Scott Belsky, South Park Commons, Max Altman, Ben Braverman, and Thomson Nguyen of Saga, managing director Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, and angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.
Co-founder and CEO James Cadwallader stated, “How visible and favorable [brands] are in these AI systems is about to become every brand’s hair-on-fire problem.” “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.”
Statista estimates that about 13 million consumers in the United States relied using AI-powered products as their main internet search engine last year. By 2027, this number should have increased to more than 90 million. Fast Company reports that Perplexity already answers one million queries each day. In the United States, Google, the industry leader in search, has even extensively launched AI Overview, its AI search engine.
Using AI, Profound examines hundreds, occasionally even millions, of searches made on various platforms for information about a business, including its features or services. The data is then combined by the company’s algorithm, which presents an overview of how AI systems represent the brand and its rivals while pinpointing the content providers that these platforms utilize.
For instance, Profound identified how the AI displays comparative data on features like torque and towing capacity after executing more than 100,000 queries on ChatGPT over the last 30 days regarding the competitive traits between the performance of two well-known pickup trucks. Profound assigns a very good to very awful score to each attribute.
Profound discovered that, in the aforementioned example, the blue pickup vehicle had a greater towing and payload capacity than the red competition, based on ChatGPT’s responses from resources like cars.com and wheelsjoint.com.
Brands may affect the AI-generated results that mold consumer views and impact purchase decisions by collaborating with important websites and producing content on their owned and managed channels, according to Cadwallader.
Nearly twenty Fortune 500 businesses and a sizable agency inside one of the holding companies are clients of Profound. To access analytics, brands must pay a monthly subscription fee, with price tiers determined by the number of queries they want to execute. Cadwallader declined to divulge specifics.
Brands might ask to have particular search terms watched. Moreover, Profound starts auto-tracking.
According to Dylan Babbs, co-founder and CTO of Profound, the AI does research on relevant subjects in a manner akin to SEO techniques, finding themes important to the company, including customer service.
The firm obtained funds through product demonstrations and personal relationships instead of depending on a pitch deck to raise the seed round.
“It’s quite abnormal to raise without a pitch deck,” according to Cadwallader.