Profound, a startup selling software that tracks and improves how brands show up in AI search results, said on Tuesday it has closed a $180 million Series D valuing the company at $1.8 billion, TechCrunch reported. The round arrives less than seven months after its $96 million Series C, and Bloomberg's coverage carried the same $1.8 billion figure in its headline. Days later, The Estée Lauder Companies disclosed a global partnership that puts Profound's tooling across its entire brand portfolio, in a report Storyboard18 first published on September 18, three days after the funding news broke.
Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins led the new round, with existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and South Park Commons participating, according to TechCrunch. The two-year-old company began as an analytics product and has since broadened into research and marketing strategy work, helping businesses understand how AI systems steer consumers toward their brands. TechCrunch places it within a cohort of startups working on generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization, the GEO and AEO acronyms now attached to the practice of getting products surfaced inside AI assistants that consumers increasingly use in place of search.
The growth figures come from the company itself: revenue up threefold over the past six months, and an enterprise customer base that has passed 1,000 accounts, including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies and Walmart. Those numbers have not been independently verified in the reporting.
The Estée Lauder agreement expands Profound's use across the beauty group's full global brand portfolio. Estée Lauder describes itself as the first prestige beauty company to deploy Profound's capabilities globally across all its brands. The company will receive a consolidated view of how those brands appear on platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini, including when the platforms recommend them and whether the descriptions are accurate. It plans to use the tools to identify gaps in AI-led product discovery.
The work extends into content. Product pages, blogs, YouTube material and other assets will be reworked so that product details, ingredients, claims and benefits are easier for large language models to parse, per Storyboard18. The resulting AI visibility data feeds into the company's One Operating Ecosystem, giving it a portfolio-wide read on how consumers encounter its brands through these channels.
"The way people discover beauty is being rewritten in real time, and we intend to shape that shift rather than reacting to it," said Aude Gandon, Estée Lauder's global chief digital and marketing officer, in the announcement. Profound CEO and co-founder James Cadwallader said the company "is now approaching GEO in the way the best marketers approach any platform shift: early, comprehensively, and with real operational commitment."
Profound's funding and the Estée Lauder agreement show investor and corporate demand for AI visibility tools. The company's valuation nearly doubled in less than seven months, suggesting that its investors expect AI visibility to become a recurring marketing expense. Estée Lauder is deploying the tools across its brand portfolio and central data system rather than limiting them to a pilot. The reporting does not establish whether Profound's product delivers the promised results, but it does show that a global advertiser has begun buying AI visibility measurement at portfolio scale. Marketing teams will also need to decide who is responsible for how their brands appear in AI answers.