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Poland's WB Group unveils Gladius 2 loitering munition with stealth-bomber shapeOmni Group Ships Day-One Updates for Apple's 2027 Platforms, Adding Siri AI to OmniFocusPoll Finds Broad Opposition to AI Data Centers, but No Clear Partisan EdgeGoogle launches Gemini 3.8 Live voice models with real-time reasoningAIUC raises $40M to begin auditing frontier AI modelsApple Car Key Reportedly Expands to Lincoln, Freelander and Lucid in Backend Code
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Profound raises $180M at $1.8B valuation to boost brands' AI visibility

Profound, officially Cooper Square Technologies, raised $180 million in a Series D round at a $1.8 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins led the investment. The company helps brands track and improve how they appear in AI chatbot answers.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-16 08:20

Profound, officially Cooper Square Technologies Inc., helps companies increase their visibility in artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT. Its cloud platform identifies the prompts that a brand's target buyers use to research products, then finds ways to increase how often the brand appears in chatbots' prompt responses.

For example, an electronics retailer could use Profound to identify the ChatGPT queries consumers typically use to research smartwatches. The platform can surface the most popular prompts from the past week and flag patterns in those prompts. It might show that smartwatch-related queries often focus on health tracking features. Companies can use that information to align website content more closely with users' AI prompts, which Profound says can lead chatbots to cite their content more often.

Profound says its platform also handles related tasks. Companies can check whether AI prompt responses describe their products accurately. The software measures consumer sentiment around each of a brand's offerings to identify weak points. It also helps brands find prompts that cause AI tools to mention rivals. In June, Profound launched a tool that measures how a brand's chatbot ads compare with competitors' campaigns.

Profound gathers prompt data from consumer panels, or groups of users who share their AI queries with market researchers. Participants complete what the company describes as a double opt-in process before their information is collected. Profound also filters prompts that contain personal data.

The platform can flag areas for improvement in marketing efforts and automate some related work. Earlier this year, Profound introduced a feature called Aim that autonomously plans AI visibility initiatives. It later launched a tool that can automatically generate chatbot ads. James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO, said Profound started as an analytics platform for marketers to understand how buyers discover their brands through AI, and that today marketers are using its Agents to research, write and report.

Profound will use the new capital to post-train, or customize, AI models for marketing use cases. It will also develop a benchmark for measuring how well the models automate those use cases. The company expects the research push to produce technologies that enhance its platform's capabilities.