James Cadwallader is the co-founder and CEO of Profound, the New York marketing platform that shows brands how they appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI answers. A former influencer marketing founder, he has taken Profound to $334.5 million raised and a $1.8 billion valuation, and his founder-led media presence makes him a working model of modern communications for PR and marketing teams.
Published November 4, 2026. Funding figures come from company announcements and press coverage and may change. Quotes are paraphrased unless shown in quotation marks.
Summary
- Cadwallader co-founded Profound with Dylan Babbs in 2024 and previously founded the influencer marketing firm Kyra.
- Profound announced a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation on September 15, 2026, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
- The company says it works with about 10% of the Fortune 500, and customers named in coverage include Eight Sleep and MongoDB.
- Cadwallader argues that AI answers are the new front door of the internet and that brands must be built for AI agents as well as people.
- His media footprint spans Fortune, Sequoia's Training Data podcast, Kleiner Perkins's Grit, Web Summit, Pigment's Perspectives and Wix Studio's AI Search Lab.
- Profound announced Aim, an always-on background agent for marketing teams, on July 2, 2026.
On this page: Who is he · The Profound story · Funding and valuation · What the platform does · Where Profound sits in the market · His thesis on AI and marketing · What citation data says · His media footprint · Lessons for PR and marketing teams · Open questions · FAQ
Who is James Cadwallader?
James Cadwallader is an entrepreneur who moved from influencer marketing into AI infrastructure, and that route explains a great deal about how Profound is built. Before Profound, Fortune reports, he founded Kyra, an influencer marketing firm. Influencer marketing is a discipline where attention, measurement and brand trust are inseparable, and those three themes run through everything Cadwallader has said publicly about AI search since.
In January 2024 he joined South Park Commons as a Founder Fellow in its S24 cohort, according to his public LinkedIn profile as summarized by Silicon Valley Investclub. South Park Commons is a community for founders who are still deciding what to build, and it is where Cadwallader met Dylan Babbs, who became Profound's co-founder and CTO. The two met at the community's New York office before the fellowship began, and they founded Profound later in 2024. His LinkedIn lists his role as co-founder and CEO of Profound from August 2024.
That timeline is short. In roughly two years the company has gone from a founding idea to a platform that its investors describe as the leader of a new software category. For communications professionals, the speed is the first lesson: the shift from search results to AI answers created a measurement gap so wide that a new company could fill it quickly.
What is the Profound story?
Profound is the marketing platform for the AI era, in the company's own description, and it is headquartered in New York with additional offices in San Francisco, London and Buenos Aires. Cadwallader serves as co-founder and CEO and Dylan Babbs as co-founder and CTO. The company's pitch is simple to state: a growing share of buyer research now happens inside AI answers, and brands need to see and shape what those answers say.
Cadwallader has described the origin of the idea on the Pigment Perspectives podcast. The key realization, he said, was that AI products send crawlers across the web, gather information the way a person would, and then let a language model assemble a brand-new answer with citations. When the team understood what that meant for brands, he said, they went all in. The consequence is that visibility is no longer a ranking on a page of links. It is a mention, a recommendation or a citation inside a synthesized answer. Listen to the Pigment Perspectives conversation.
Fortune captured the tone of the opportunity when it covered the Series B, quoting Cadwallader calling the change a "Game of Thrones power shift" away from decades of SEO tactics. Read the Fortune report.
How much has Profound raised, and at what valuation?
Profound has announced $334.5 million in total funding, according to EPR's tracking, making it the best-funded company in the AI visibility category. Its rounds have each come at a higher valuation than the last, and each has added a marquee investor.
| Date | Round | Size and valuation | Lead investors |
|---|
| August 2025 | Series B | $35 million | Sequoia Capital |
| February 2026 | Series C | $96 million at a $1 billion valuation | Lightspeed |
| September 15, 2026 | Series D | $180 million at a $1.8 billion valuation | Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, co-leads |
Sequoia's Anas Biad led the Series B, and EPR explains the investment thesis in its profile of Biad and the Profound deal. Cadwallader discussed the Series C on the TBPN show on February 24, 2026, where the round was reported as valuing Profound at $1 billion. For the full round-by-round picture, see EPR's coverage of the Series D valuation.
The size of these rounds matters beyond the headline. In EPR's AI Visibility Directory, the next best-funded companies, Bluefish at $68 million and AirOps at about $60 million as the company states it, sit well behind Profound. Capital of this scale lets a company hire sales and research teams, build agents and secure enterprise contracts, which in turn produces the case studies and customer logos that attract the next round.
The platform has three jobs: measure, analyze and act. It measures how often and how a brand appears across AI engines, analyzes which sources those engines cite, and increasingly uses agents to carry out the content and distribution work that follows. The table summarizes what the company and press coverage describe.
| Capability | What it does | Why it matters to communications teams |
|---|
| Visibility tracking | Tracks how a brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other engines | Turns an invisible channel into a number a team can report |
| Citation analysis | Shows which pages and domains the engines cite in a brand's category | Identifies the outlets and pages a PR program should target |
| Agents | Carries out marketing work with software agents, including Profound Aim | Moves a team from reporting to execution |
| Agent analytics | Shows when AI crawlers and agents visit a brand's own site | Treats an AI visit as a proxy for a human visit |
The most recent product is Profound Aim, announced on July 2, 2026. According to the company's release, Aim is an always-on background agent that identifies a marketing team's highest-impact opportunities, prioritizes work and coordinates execution. Cadwallader described its purpose in the release: teams know what is happening and need to know what to do next, and Aim watches constantly for what changed, why it matters and what to do about it. Read the Profound Aim announcement.
Cadwallader has also made a point about agent traffic on the Pigment podcast. A user agent that visits a page in real time to supply a citation for a question, he argued, is worth far more than an indexer that crawls without purpose, because it behaves almost like a proxy for a human visit. That framing helps explain why Profound tracks AI crawler visits as a metric in its own right.
Where does Profound sit in the AI visibility market?
Profound is the enterprise leader in a crowded category. EPR's directory lists 17 companies that sell AI visibility software, from free tiers to custom enterprise contracts, and several have raised substantial capital. The comparison below uses rounds already reported in EPR's coverage.
| Company | Reported funding | Positioning |
|---|
| Profound | $334.5 million announced; $1.8 billion valuation | Enterprise visibility platform and agents |
| Bluefish | $68 million; $43 million Series B in April 2026 | Agentic marketing for Fortune 500 brands |
| AirOps | About $60 million, per the company; $40 million Series B led by Greylock | Content engineering for AI search |
| Brandlight | About $36 million; $30 million Series A led by Pelion | Enterprise AI visibility program |
| Peec AI | About $29 million; $21 million Series A led by Singular | Monitoring and analytics for marketing teams and agencies |
Three acquisitions have also reshaped the field: Sitecore bought Scrunch on June 3, 2026, Adobe completed its Semrush purchase on April 28, 2026, and HubSpot bought XFunnel in October 2025. Against that backdrop Profound has stayed independent while scaling, which positions it as the category's standalone enterprise platform. EPR's comparison of AI visibility tools sets out how the platforms differ on price and engine coverage.
What is Cadwallader's thesis on AI and marketing?
His thesis is that marketing is going through its biggest platform shift in history, and that the visitor to a brand's digital front door is changing from a person to an agent. On Sequoia's Training Data podcast he made the case that the front door of the internet has not changed but the visitor walking through it has, and that marketers must now build for a superintelligent agent with unlimited bandwidth. He added that a marketing team not using agents to do its work is falling behind. Hear the Sequoia conversation.
In a Wix Studio AI Search Lab interview he went further, calling AI the biggest disruption in the history of capitalism, and describing a future where people no longer need to click. That view is the intellectual core of Profound's product, which assumes the click is increasingly optional and the answer is where the brand wins or loses. See the Wix Studio interview.
Cadwallader has given marketers concrete guidance as well. On Pigment's podcast he said brands should cover real buyer questions thoroughly and accurately, because content supplies the raw material answer engines rely on. He said Profound has seen page citations rise by upwards of 20% when FAQs are appended to the bottom of a page. He also looks ahead to what he calls generative UI: an AI answer that builds a new web page in real time for the person asking, much as the first websites replaced plain text screens.
At Web Summit Vancouver in 2026, a session summary records him arguing that how AI talks about a brand is becoming marketing's most critical function. For communications teams, that sentence deserves attention. It places the work of reputation, narrative and third-party validation at the center of the marketing mix, rather than at its edge.
How does Cadwallader's advice line up with the citation data?
His advice lines up well with what EPR's citation research shows. The sources AI engines cite most are structured, authoritative and often earned: encyclopedic references, major news outlets, professional networks and video. Three findings from EPR's engine-by-engine indexes illustrate the point.
- Structured authority beats open forums on ChatGPT. EPR's ChatGPT Citation Source Index documents how citation share moved from open-forum content toward structured, authority-tagged sources after September 2025, and newer Ahrefs data shows primary sources such as PubMed rising in US answers.
- Claude rewards institutional and long-form sources. The Claude Citation Source Index shows 97.8% of Claude's health citations coming from established institutions and an 86.7% overlap between cited URLs and Brave Search results.
- Gemini leans on Google's own properties. The Gemini Citation Source Index finds roughly 43% of citations across Google's AI search surfaces pointing to Google-owned properties, with YouTube the largest.
These patterns support Cadwallader's FAQ and question-led content advice, since structured, well-organized pages are what the engines extract. They also support his point about agents, because crawler access and clear page structure decide whether an engine can read a page at all. The practical takeaway is that a single platform view across engines matters, because each engine cites a different mix of sources.
Cadwallader is one of the most widely heard voices in AI visibility, and his appearances show how a clear point of view travels through the channels AI engines read. The table lists the appearances found in public coverage.
| Outlet or venue | Format | Date |
|---|
| Fortune | Profile of the Series B | August 2025 |
| Kleiner Perkins, Grit | Podcast with partner Ilya Fushman | December 22, 2025 |
| Wix Studio AI Search Lab | Human in the Loop interview | Published in 2026 |
| TBPN | Series C discussion | February 24, 2026 |
| Sequoia, Training Data | Episode 83 podcast | 2026 |
| Shoptalk Spring | Speaker listing | 2026 |
| Web Summit Vancouver | Session on brand discovery in AI | 2026 |
| Pigment, Perspectives | Podcast on how to rank in AI search | 2026 |
On the Kleiner Perkins Grit podcast he discussed how brands such as Eight Sleep and MongoDB gain visibility and leverage inside AI models, with Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman. Hear the Grit conversation.
The pattern is instructive for any executive building a profile. Each appearance is on an authoritative, extractable platform, a venture firm's own site, a major business publication or a conference. Those are the same kinds of sources the engines cite, so the founder's message reinforces the category narrative in the places that count.
What can PR and marketing teams learn from his approach?
- Treat AI answers as a measurable channel. Profound's pitch is that how AI describes a brand is a core marketing function. Teams that report on it, like any other channel, can fund it and improve it.
- Write for questions, not keywords. Cadwallader's advice is to cover real buyer questions in full and to end pages with a clear FAQ. That is also how EPR structures its own articles.
- Plan for agents as readers. Pages need to work for software agents that arrive in real time. Crawler access, clean structure and clear facts matter more than ever.
- Earn third-party validation. The engines favor sources outside the brand. A funding announcement, a podcast with a major investor and a profile in Fortune carry more weight than a company's own description of itself.
- Build a founder voice on the right platforms. A consistent point of view, repeated across authoritative channels, shapes the narrative the engines retrieve.
- Use agents to close the gap between insight and action. Aim reflects a broader shift from dashboards that report to agents that act, and communications teams should plan for that workflow.
- Watch several engines, not one. Citation mixes differ by engine, so a one-engine view can mislead.
What are the open questions for Profound and the category?
The category is moving fast, and a few questions will shape the next year. First, citation behavior shifts quickly: EPR's research shows large swings in sources such as Reddit and Wikipedia on ChatGPT within months, so any platform's value depends on tracking those shifts accurately. Second, consolidation is under way, with Sitecore, Adobe and HubSpot acquiring tools, so Profound's independence is a notable feature. Third, as AI answers search less and cite fewer pages, brands will need to judge success by citations and assistant referrals, not clicks alone.
These are the questions any leader in the space has to answer. Cadwallader's public record suggests Profound intends to answer them with agents, scale and a steady stream of data, which is also why communications teams are paying close attention.
