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Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins double Profound's valuation to $1.8bn seven months after Lightspeed's round
The $180m Series D sells roughly the same tenth of the company that $96m bought in February, and the performance figure behind the new price is revenue tripling in six months. Profound counts more than 1,000 enterprise brands.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Profound raised $180m in a Series D at a $1.8bn valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, and dated September 15, 2026.
- The round lands seven months after a $96m Series C led by Lightspeed priced the two-year-old company at $1bn, and total funding since 2024 now exceeds $335m.
- Profound says it serves more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100, and The SaaS News reports revenue tripled in the past six months.
- The New York company is using the capital to open an applied-AI research operation in San Francisco studying how frontier models handle marketing work.
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Why it matters
- decision Selling roughly the same tenth of the company twice keeps the founders' position intact, and moves the hard pricing question to the Series E, where $1.8bn becomes the floor the next investor has to clear.
- constraint Ads Studio spends through OpenAI, Google and Meta ad managers, so the paid half of the business can only grow as fast as those three open campaign inventory to outside tools.
- precedent A $1.8bn private mark becomes the reference price for the category, and Bluefish and Peec AI now recruit and negotiate against a competitor with several times their cash.
- exposure Enterprises now buying visibility programmes built on assistant-answer data are exposed to any change the model vendors make in how those answers name brands.
Set the two rounds beside each other, reading both valuations as post-money. February's $96m at $1bn is 9.6 percent of the company; September's $180m at $1.8bn is 10 percent [1]. The share sold barely moved while the check nearly doubled, the extra $84m arriving seven months later [2]. Between the two prices the mark rose $800m, about $114m a month [3].
One performance figure is attached to the round. Revenue tripled in the past six months, according to The SaaS News, which also reported that the announcement did not detail how the capital will be spent [7][8]. Profound did not disclose the revenue base. At $1.8bn, 100 times revenue implies about $18m and 50 times implies about $36m [6].
The customer count is firmer. TechFundingNews reports more than 1,000 enterprise brands, including a third of the Fortune 100, which is roughly 33 of those accounts [6][5]. Divide the new valuation by the logos and the round pays under $1.8m per existing enterprise brand [4]. Total funding since 2024 is above $335m [4], so something like $59m came in before the Series C [9].
Berlin's Peec AI raised a $21m Series A in November 2025, has raised about $29m in total, and prices for agencies rather than enterprises [16]. Bluefish raised a $43m Series B in April, $68m in total, and chases the same Fortune 500 accounts [17]. Profound's single round is about 6.2 times Peec AI's lifetime total and about 2.6 times Bluefish's [7].
Both ends of the product sit inside other companies' systems. The measurement side draws on more than two billion real user prompts to track how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention a brand and against which competitors [11]. The new Ads Studio launches paid AI Search campaigns directly into OpenAI's, Google's and Meta's ad managers [12]. "As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows," said Ilya Fushman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins [14].
Renewals will settle whether the $1.8bn holds. If a thousand enterprises treat visibility inside assistant answers as a standing line item, tripling revenue again makes this an ordinary growth round and the $335m buys sales coverage neither rival can fund. Two developments would argue the other way: OpenAI or Google reporting brand visibility inside their own ad managers, which would make the analytics half a free feature, and Peec AI's cheaper agency pricing pulling the measurement business down to a commodity [16]. Chief executive James Cadwallader said customers had shown Profound how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose-built AI helping them with their work. [13]
What to watch
- Whether OpenAI or Google add brand-visibility reporting inside their own ad managers, which would make the measurement half a free feature.
- The next raises from Bluefish and Peec AI, and the marks they carry against Profound's $1.8bn.
- Any disclosed revenue or net-retention figure that puts an actual multiple on the $1.8bn.