Profound’s $35 Million Series B: Proof That the Next Wave of Marketing Belongs to AI

The Headline Shift

When Profound AI announced a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with backing from Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, it sent a clear message to every marketing leader:

“The future of marketing isn’t just about humans — it’s about how brands appear to AI.”

At Blackbird, we help brands prepare for that future — by optimising how they’re represented and discovered across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Profound’s latest raise validates what we’ve been seeing across our clients: AI is fast becoming the new gateway to influence, discovery, and conversion.

🧠 Marketing to AI: The New Frontier

Profound’s mission is simple yet revolutionary — to help companies control how AI interprets and talks about their brand.

They’re building a “read/write” marketing engine — meaning brands won’t just analyse what AI says about them, they’ll actively shape it.

This matters because the traditional marketing funnel is being rewritten.
Search is giving way to answers.
Algorithms are giving way to agents.
And your brand story is increasingly being told by machines — unless you take charge of it.

📊 What This Means for CMOs

For today’s marketing leaders, the implications are clear:

1. AI is the new distribution channel.
   Visibility isn’t just about ranking on Google — it’s about being cited, surfaced, and summarised by AI engines.

2. Your content must speak “machine.”
   Structured data, semantic cues, and AI-friendly narratives now sit at the heart of brand strategy.
   The content you create for humans also needs to perform for algorithms.

3. Budgets are shifting to AI visibility.
   As AI adoption grows, media and content spend will increasingly flow towards ensuring your brand is understood — and recommended — by AI systems.

🦅 How Blackbird Fits In

Blackbird exists to help forward-thinking CMOs and marketing teams thrive in this new environment.

Our AI Visibility Engine tracks and optimises how your brand appears across conversational platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google SGE — helping you measure, influence, and grow your visibility where your buyers are now discovering products.

We help you:

• Audit your brand presence across major AI engines

• Optimise for AI discoverability with structured, machine-readable content

• Monitor visibility shifts as algorithms evolve

• Plan next-generation media strategies that blend human and AI attention

Profound’s Series B proves the direction is right. The world’s top investors now agree:

“Brands need to think not just in pixels and keywords, but in prompts and answers.”

⚡ The Bottom Line

AI is already the first touchpoint between your brand and your buyer.
If you’re not visible there — you’re invisible everywhere.

At Blackbird, we’re helping brands stay seen, understood, and recommended across the new ecosystem of AI-powered discovery.

Let’s talk about how you can future-proof your visibility strategy.