Profound was inevitable. AI users are still very much in the garden: every piece of data presented to us because a benevolent machine tried in earnest to solve our problem, unsullied by advertising and ‘promoted’ results.

How do you satiate advertisers’ desire to influence the AI to recommend their offering without ruining this beautiful new paradigm? Profound answers this riddle by giving advertisers a way to influence the zeitgeist without polluting the town square.

Google’s advertising-driven economic machine is a different beast entirely. Born from a moment of information scarcity, consumers have accepted the inherently terrible UI/UX of advertising’s infiltration, lowering the fidelity and purity of information presented. This imperfect bargain is possibly the greatest economic machine ever built, generating $100B in free cash over the last 12 months (at the time this was written in June 2025).

This is the most painful innovator’s dilemma in history. Will Google be brave enough to burn the ships and torch the largest profit pool in history? Will the AI labs be disciplined enough to avoid the trap and find other ways to monetize that don’t degrade the UI/UX back to the legacy ads-driven benchmark?

When we met James Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs, it wasn’t clear yet just how successful the large labs would be at monetizing novel channels. But a consensus was emerging that none of the major players would take the bait and monetize the old way. The experience in ChatGPT without ads is too delightful, we assumed (correctly) that advertisers would have to find another way to spend their money to influence the AI.

Profound launched in the fall of 2024. Leading with the right idea, executed relentlessly by the right team at the exact right moment, James and Dylan have made Profound synonymous with a new category. Profound is how brands get mentioned by AI across platforms. It’s remarkable how many Fortune 100 CEOs and CMOs personally look to James and Dylan to thrive in this new medium. In less than a year of existence, Profound has become part of the core workflow of the world’s top brands and ad agencies.

The story of how Saga led Profound’s seed is for another day. Suffice it to say it happened quickly and involved sending Keith Rabois the deck which he reviewed while at a wedding in France.

We weren’t surprised (though we were thrilled) when our friends at Kleiner Perkins leaned in for the Series A. Profound now has the war chest to continue building a bleeding edge product and a world class investor and board member in Ilya Fushman.