AI platform for marketing Profound follows The Estée Lauder Companies deal with $180m Series D raise
Profound has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, as it builds an AI platform for marketing. “Two years ago we bet that people would stop clicking blue links and ask AI for the answer. It happened. The agent is now the customer. It scans hundreds of thousands of sources to form an opinion of your brand, and it wants all content current and specific,” says says James Cadwallader, CEO and Co-founder, Profound.
He adds: “Winning in AI search means being everywhere, all at once. It's an inhuman amount of work, and the only way to do it is with agents. That's why we built your AI Marketer, powered by Context Manager. Your AI Marketer is a marketing expert that proactively investigates your data, identifies opportunities, and then does the work while you stay in the loop. Context Manager is the system of record for your marketing context. It turns your meetings, threads, and brand data into one shared, permissioned understanding of your brand, plus a personal layer for how you work. This context is the antidote to slop, so as your brand evolves, so does your AI Marketer.”
“Today, more than 2,500 brands, including a third of the Fortune 100, do their marketing in Profound. Profound lives at the application layer, meaning your AI Marketer can harness the raw intelligence of Fable this week and Astra next week. And CMO's can audit, govern, and meter its work. I speak to CMOs every day and the expectation of what AI should do for marketing has changed completely. Yet frontier intelligence keeps going to code, finance and law. Engineers have Cognition. Lawyers have Harvey. Marketers… have been left in the lurch. Profound is expanding our applied AI research team to post-train models for marketing and build the first benchmark for real-world marketing tasks. More coming on that soon.”
The Estée Lauder Companies
Earlier this week, The Estée Lauder Companies announced a partnership with Profound, providing it with visibility into how its brands are represented across leading generative AI platforms, as well as opportunities to optimise that representation. It becomes the first in prestige beauty to deploy Profound’s capabilities globally across the company’s full portfolio and operationalise GEO and AI marketing at scale.
“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, Global Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, The Estée Lauder Companies. “This partnership gives every brand in our portfolio the ability to show up distinctly, consistently, and accurately wherever our consumers are asking for recommendations. Our work with Profound is a natural extension of how we already think about culture, community, and commerce working together, and it puts us at the front of an industry wide transition.”
“The Estée Lauder Companies recognises that understanding how its brands are represented across AI is now essential to serving consumers wherever they choose to discover products and information,” said Cadwallader. “Through this partnership, the company is now approaching GEO in the way the best marketers approach any platform shift: early, comprehensively, and with real operational commitment. Enabling this strategy at scale across an entire prestige beauty portfolio sets a new bar for what enterprise AI visibility strategy looks like in this category.”
2026 RTIH Innovation Awards
AI will be a key focus area at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.
The awards are now open for entries and celebrate global retail technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.
Our winners will be revealed at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London on Wednesday, 4th November.
Check out our 2025 winners here.
Our 2025 hall of fame entrants were revealed during a sold out event which took place at The HAC on 16th October and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by award winning comedian, actress and writer Tiff Stevenson.
In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “This is the awards’ fifth year as a physical event. We started off with just 30 people at the South Place Hotel not far from here, then moved to London Bridge Hotel, then The Barbican, and last year RIBA’s HQ in the West End.”
“But I’m conscious of the fact that, to quote the legend that is Taylor Swift, You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby. So, this year we’ve moved to our biggest venue yet, and also pulled in our largest number of entries to date and broken attendance records.”
He added: “This year’s submissions have without doubt been our best yet. To quote one of the judges: The examples of innovative developments across both traditional and digital retail spaces were truly remarkable.”
Congratulations to our winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors, judging panel, the legend that is Tiff Stevenson, and all those who attended our 2025 gathering.
