How Profound Became Your Company’s ChatGPT and Claude Whisperer

Dylan Babbs and James Cadwallader, who just raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation, share how they’ve built a marketers’ best friend: a service to control brand reputation as AI answers become the new battleground.

BY NICOLE GULL MCELROY

Last year, Vineet Mehra, chief marketing officer and chief growth officer at San Francisco-based fintech company Chime, was looking for a tool that could help him understand why AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude weren’t always recommending Chime. That’s when he came across Profound, a fast-growing marketing tool for companies wanting to track—and influence—how AI platforms talk about their products and services. 

“It was the only tool at the time that could tell us why we were absent: which sources the models pulled from, which competitors got surfaced instead, whether it was a content gap or a citation gap,” he explains. It’s a high-stakes category in a heavily regulated industry, he notes. “People aren’t asking an LLM what shirt to buy. They’re asking where to put their paycheck, whether they can trust a company, and what happens to their money when they open a new bank account.” 

When someone asks Claude or ChatGPT, “What savings account should I open?” or “What’s the best account for someone rebuilding credit?” they don’t get a list of links like they would from a search engine. “Instead, they’re getting a synthesized answer that has the potential to shape how they think about a brand,” Mehra says. “The challenge was that we couldn’t see inside that answer to audit the narrative or understand what was shaping it,” Chime is now using Profound to track almost 1,000 potential AI prompts across 21 topics.

Consumers are increasingly seeking answers from AI chatbots rather than traditional search engines. A report from Bain & Co. last year found that zero-click results from AI engines like Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot had lowered organic search traffic by an estimated 15 to 25 percent. 

“Companies—big and small—need to be aware of how their brand is or isn’t showing up, and what type of visibility they have with different generative engines and in different places,” says Kelly Cutler, associate professor at the Medill Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University. “I’m talking about AI-mediated discovery. The growth trajectory is staggering.”

That’s where Profound comes in. Since co-founders James Cadwallader, 37, and Dylan Babbs, 31, launched the New York City-based company in 2024, Profound has quickly slid to the bleeding edge of the so-called answer engine optimization (AEO) landscape. It’s a space that nearly every CMO is fumbling through, and one that Profound aims to dominate, with services that help businesses understand and influence how they show up when AI talks about them. 

Cadwallader and Babbs have raised four rounds in the past 18 months, including a $20 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, and a $96 million Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners earlier this year. In September, a $180 million Series D was led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, pushing Profound’s valuation to $1.8 billion. The startup, which now has more than 300 employees, counts large companies such as Walmart, Target, and U.S. Bank as customers as well as more than 1,000 startups and other businesses. According to the company, a third of the Fortune 100 and 16 percent of the Fortune 500 are its customers. 

How AI and humans search differently

Profound was created with the idea that humans won’t always be marketers’ target customers. “There were two key predictions of the future that underpinned what we wanted........

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