Profound vs You.com

Profound raises $180M in Series D to build your AI Marketer

Profound has raised $180M to build the AI platform for marketing. CEO James Cadwallader writes why AI is creating more work for marketers, and how AI Marketer brings company context and agents together to help teams do it.

Estée Lauder Adopts GEO for AI Visibility

Estée Lauder has forged a global partnership with AI marketing platform Profound to enhance its brands' visibility in generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini. The beauty conglomerate will leverage Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to analyze and improve how its products appear in AI-driven search and answer platforms. This initiative, integrated into its One Operating Ecosystem, marks a significant step in treating AI visibility as a core marketing discipline, with content optimization across product pages, blogs, and YouTube channels. The partnership highlights the growing importance of AI assistants as new discovery channels for consumers.

• Estée Lauder partners with Profound, an AI marketing platform, for global GEO strategy.
• Focus is on analyzing and optimizing brand presence in AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini.
• The initiative will be deployed across Estée Lauder's entire brand portfolio worldwide.

AI search marketing startup Profound raises $180M Series D at $1.8B valuation

Profound, a marketing software startup that helps brands appear in AI search results, announced a $180 million Series D funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation, just seven months after its $96 million Series C. The round was co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and South Park Commons. The company, which launched two years ago as an analytics platform, now focuses on generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO), helping businesses understand how AI systems influence consumer brand discovery. Profound reports revenue growth of 3x in the past six months and serves over 1,000 enterprise customers, including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, and Walmart. The funding will likely support expansion and product development in the rapidly growing AI search optimization space.

• Profound raised $180 million in Series D funding.
• The valuation is $1.8 billion, making Profound a unicorn.
• Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round.

Knowledge: Live Stock Prices, Sports, Crypto, And More. Now In Web Search. Same $5 CPM.

You.com has launched a new 'Knowledge' feature for its Web Search API, adding live stock prices, crypto, weather, and prediction markets at the same $5 CPM price point. The company also announced a partnership with Pydantic AI for agent orchestration and released several new developer guides and product updates.

Richard Socher's Recursive Raises $4.65B Seed for Self-Improving AI

In a podcast episode, Richard Socher discusses his new venture, Recursive, which raised a $4.65B seed round to develop self-improving AI systems. Socher outlines his vision of a 'Eureka Machine' that can automate AI research itself, compressing years of human work into weeks. He details early results where Recursive's system outperformed humans and other agents on optimization tasks like NanoChat, NanoGPT, and NVIDIA GPU kernels. He critiques Anthropic's constitutional AI approach as ineffective and advocates for open-source models as geopolitical soft power. He also shares his framework of ten 'spaces of intelligence' and discusses the potential of AI for driving scientific breakthroughs in areas like energy, materials, and biology.

• Recursive raised a $4.65B seed round.
• Richard Socher is the founder of Recursive, You.com, and AIX Ventures.
• Recursive's AI system outperformed humans and agents on optimization tasks in under two days.

You.com announces the Answer API: grounded, cited answers powered by real-time web search

You.com introduces the Answer API, providing grounded, cited answers powered by real-time web search. The new API is now available and featured on the homepage.