Building Marketing for the AI Era | Profound, James Cadwallader

Every marketer on the planet is going to care about how AI talks about their brand. I believe that. I think in 10 years that will only be more true. In this new world where content is cheap and easy, the new table stakes becomes quality content. So how do you create high-quality content? Dare I say content that's higher quality than if a human had written it at scale?

You guys started Profound as the first purpose-built platform to track brand visibility in the AI era.

We work with I mean, quite literally the biggest companies in the world. Our platform is used by 10% of the Fortune 500. Every marketer, it's at the tip of their tongue, it's at boardroom levels. The whole world is talking about what we're working on now. Our ambition is very much to build a category-defining business in this world where every marketer is going to use AI to create marketing. I think they're going to need a place to do that. I think Profound can become that.

Hi everyone, I'm Sachin Patel, partner at Lightspeed. And this is The Investment Memo, the show where founders reveal the stories behind their businesses and how they will shape the future of their industries. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, the company building the end-to-end automation platform for marketers and brands. In less than 2 years, James has gone from an idea to a team of over 100. Defining how we discover and interact with products online. On today's episode, we'll talk about how AI has disrupted search and how Profound built a platform for over 1,000 companies, including some of the biggest brands in the world like MongoDB, Ramp, Chime, and so many more. James, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

James, congratulations. Profound just raised a Series C. This is the memo we wrote when we decided to invest in Profound a few months ago. So I want you to have this and give it a look. So James, you have a remarkable, remarkable background and you can see from the first bullet there, it's kind of the first thing we as partners talked about. I'm going to ask you to share the story, but I also know from getting to know you, you're a fan of props. I got you a little gift, which I think fits to the story you're going to tell. So I'd love to have you just open that and see what's in there.

Thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah, I won't put this on, but I'll hold it like right here.

Maybe you already look ridiculous, so I'm not going to ask you to put it on. But there's a reason behind my madness. So I'll let you tell us why you're holding a gold chain.

My background is pretty unorthodox in that I didn't go to school. I didn't go to university, I should say. I'm from the UK, as you could probably tell from my accent. When I was 18, a friend and I were looking for a summer job. It was 2009. It was just after the GFC and the price of gold, I mean, as it has continued to do so, had gone sky high and we built a business trading gold, buying and selling gold. It was a very good place for me to learn sales. We knocked on people's doors. Every day and ask to buy their broken old scrap jewelry on their doorstep. There's nothing harder than knocking on people's doors. Yeah, sending emails is kind of hard. Making lots of cold calls is like pretty damn hard. But knocking on people's doors, especially, you know, after work, people kind of inherently hate someone knocking on their door. Yeah. And so you get told to fuck off a lot and it builds very thick skin. And yeah, that was how we built that business. And that was kind of my first taste of entrepreneurship when I was younger.

You were 18 at the time, and obviously some of even the greatest entrepreneurs in our tech world started selling door to door. Michael Dell comes to mind. What's sort of the craziest experience you had when someone opened the door? Like what comes to mind when someone did maybe something crazy or different?

You learn very quickly that people respond well to the energy that you emit. So if you are nervous or coy when you knock on someone's door, you know, they'll kind of react, not necessarily they won't mirror that behavior, but you can really start to understand kind of energy exchange. And I think if you knock on someone's door and you give a cheeky smile, you're like, hey, I'm sorry to bother you, but, you know, can I just have 5 minutes of your time? I promise it won't be a waste of your time. People respond very well. So you're kind of like learning that muscle group very well. The surprising thing is just how nice people are on average. Broad strokes. Yeah, there were some outliers.

I gotta imagine some people weren't pleased to see you.

Yeah, we got some. There are a few nasty stories where people were very rude, but yeah, ultimately kind of, I would never resent them for being rude because I'm encroaching into their space.

As you think about all of those experiences, where are you pulling the most inspiration from as you think about running Profound and the company today? You're based in Silicon Valley with a bunch of other great companies. Where does your inspiration come from?

I've been a disciple of business or, you know, a student of business despite not going to university. I've just always ferociously read every biography I could get my hands on. I love David Senra, Founders. Yeah, he's an angel investor in the company now, which is very cool. That's awesome. But I love reading stories of other founders. And I'll say the sort of the quiet part out loud. And I know this is, I would say, I think this is true, but actually I unequivocally know this is true from the, I've got other founder friends who are very successful Most of us are essentially insecure and quite anxious beings who tend to have like a chip on your shoulder and you got something to prove. It's a constant feeling of I've not worked hard enough or could I push harder? And it's almost impossible to shake. It's like this, I, it's maybe a little dramatic, but like a, you could call it an anxiety or a pain that quite often the only remedy is to work. So it's like it lives inside me, and it's— and the only, the only cure is when I'm working. I feel it like a cool, a calmness wash over me because I feel like I'm removing that, that feeling. In terms of particular inspiration, the person I'm going to say is god tier, so by no means am I comparing myself to him, but I think Travis Kalanick would be someone that I've always looked up to. There's a great video of Travis at FailCon It's super old. I think it was before the IPO, and it's Travis talking about this journey that he had to get to Uber and all the failures he had and the ducking and diving. And if you've seen the movie Uncut Gems.

Yeah, incredible.

It's like that energy, but Travis Kalanick's story.

Adam Sandler energy.

Kind of that just safty energy of just total chaos and just like absolute— Yeah, it's—

You feel anxious the entire time.

Yeah, you feel anxious hearing the story, like when Travis was doing this and that and ducking and diving and making it work and then now understand that he then built Uber is so cool. And yeah, I'd say, you know, a lot of that resonates with me. I didn't come from a prestigious background. I grew up with a single mother and yeah, I feel like I kind of like crawled out of the backwater, you know, not, it wasn't, I didn't have a hard upbringing in the sense that it was a loving home, et cetera. So it's not to create a sob story, but I definitely feel lucky to be here.

Yeah. And it's clear that sort of the Travis story rubbed off on you and who you picked as co-founder and partner in crime. Time in Dylan, and I think we'd be remiss not to talk a little bit about Dylan and so many talented things he brings to the table for the company.

Yeah, Dylan's my co-founder, CTO. We met, I mean, we actually didn't meet there, but South Park Commons, which is just across the street, started by two of the founding engineers of Facebook. I'm like a huge advocate for South Park Commons. I think what they do is awesome. They get bucketed a lot of the time with Y Combinator, but I think they're quite different in that The SPC thesis is pre-idea. So you come to SPC without an idea. And that was when I joined. And that was a couple of years ago. And I joined, they have a branch in New York. And that was where I met my now co-founder, Dylan. Yeah, he's a super talented product engineer, previously at Uber, working on geospatial products. It's weird in that we complement each other exactly where we should do. And At the same time, we're very similar in lots of other ways. We're both hyper-aggressive, but just in quite different ways. Yeah, very aggressive on products. He moves product very, very quickly.

Anyone who's spent time with either of you would agree with that statement. Okay, well, let's transition and talk a little bit about what's happening in the world right now. We are in the midst of this mega trend and how we as consumers, as businesses, search, discover, and interact with information online. And actually, even in the last 6 months, that interface has become increasingly fragmented. 6 days. 6 days even. It's not just ChatGPT, it's ChatGPT, it's Gemini, it's Grok, and a whole long list of others. And it's abundantly clear that how we navigate, discover, and transact in the future will look different, maybe even tomorrow, but certainly in the future. For people less familiar with the space, tell us a little bit of what's going on right now. What is the shift that we're seeing and this behavior change?

So I guess, yeah, going, I can almost sort of speak chronologically in, we were at South Park Commons and ideating a bunch of different ideas and this is sort of early 2024 and it's very hard to remember because of AI timelines. Everything moves so fast. It feels like, you know, you can hardly remember it at this point, but this is when ChatGPT wasn't web connected. So if you ask ChatGPT, What was the score of the last Yankees game? Or sometimes even who the—

You get like my knowledge base from 1990.

Yeah, exactly. Do you remember if you'd ask like, who's the president of America? And it would say, as of my last training, go ahead. I should probably look into this, but I don't know if they invented it, but they definitely proliferated it. I think Perplexity deserve a real nod of the hat because they really proliferated this idea at the time, at the beginning of 2024, Perplexity were the ones who had the idea of, okay, we won't use the LLM to answer the user's query directly. We'll use the LLM to synthesize from the web and create an answer. Depending on the web pages that we use to answer the question, we'll attribute sources so the user has some sort of provenance to understand, you know, where the answer came from because, you know, there's the hallucination thing was like a very big deal back then. We were using Perplexity a lot to research ideas that we were thinking about working on. And you looked around at South Park Commons where there's lots of, you know, Typical early adopter type technologists, everyone was using Perplexity and they weren't using it because it was novel. They were using it because it was a better form of search. And it felt like a streaming to CDs type moment where once you really started to pontificate around like, okay, well, what does this mean? And digging into it a bit more. Search is the primitives that have created that huge outcome are links and clicks. And back in 2024, looking at Perplexity, two things became clear. The first was, this is gonna happen. This is inevitable because it's better. You don't have to click, you don't have to browse a list of blue links. You can just ask AI a question and get the answer. It doesn't require much brainpower to realize that that is going to proliferate very fast, as it did. And the second is that you would need to understand that the economics of search or information retrieval as a whole would change with this new paradigm because people don't need to click the links. And then you see this disintermediation between websites and the consumer because the consumer just goes to ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity and the user agent is being sent by an answer engine to crawl on their behalf. So it was like, I don't know how to explain it. Again, I'm doing another movie reference, but have you seen the movie The Big Short?

Yes. Well, I'm scared you're going to reference a movie that I haven't seen.

There's that scene in The Big Short where they go down to Florida and they look at all the empty houses and they go to a strip club and they, you know, it all comes— everything comes crashing down around them where they understand the gravity of what's happening. And that's the only way I could describe what it felt like for Dylan and I early 2024, because we were pretty early to this and people weren't talking about it. So, you know, the same realization where the whole world is talking about what we're working on now, every marketer, it's at the tip of their tongue, it's at boardroom levels. You know, Profound now works with 10% of the Fortune 500. I would, you know, attribute some of it to our genius, but the majority of it, I'd say we just picked you know, we predicted the future, you could say, quite luckily or quite well. Yeah, intuitively.

Yeah.

And yeah, we could see the size of this before other people were talking about it. And it's a really strange feeling because it's like either I'm crazy or everyone else is kind of crazy or just not seeing what we're seeing right now. And yeah, we just went all in. Very fast. Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures co-led our seed round with Max Altman's fund, Saga. We used that to attract some very strong early technical talent. We ripped as fast as we could, super aggressively, and started working with some really good brands and kind of, yeah, the rest is history.

You know, one thing you said to me when we met back in November, I thought it was quite profound. I catch myself saying profound too many times in normal sentences, but it's true. Humans won't create content for machines. Machines will create content for machines. And when humans need to orchestrate that, they're going to do it in Profound. And that feels like sort of the crazy leap of faith that you made back in '24. And as you said, starting to show up in 10% of the Fortune 500 today.

There's like two core beliefs that we need to be true. The first is that we have to be correct that every marketer on the planet is going to care about how AI talks about their brand, products, services, categories, competitors. I believe that. I think in 10 years that will only be more true. That will be one of, if not the most important priorities for every marketer on the planet, every brand, every company on the planet. I think it will actually go beyond the marketing org. I think it starts to go into developer relations, PR, brand management, reputation management, maybe even product at some point. One, everyone's going to care about how you show up when AI talks about you. And then the second is that you have to believe Every company on the planet is going to use AI to create marketing. They're the two things that we think are really important.

From my seat, they, they feel like pretty safe bets and inevitabilities. So you touched on this a little bit, 2024, you and Dylan meet at SPC. You guys started Profound as the first purpose-built platform to track brand visibility in the AI era. Now your ambition and what we all think Profound will be, will be the marketing automation platform for marketers everywhere. Platforms aren't built on day one. They start with wedges, and you guys identified and have what I would say is one of the most powerful wedges in the world, and that is analytics. Tell us a little bit more about your analytics products and how marketers are using it today.

The first question everyone has is, well, how do we show up? These models are probabilistic. So if I ask ChatGPT, you know, what's the best CRM? One day it might suggest HubSpot, the other day it might suggest Salesforce. Essentially what what we're able to do is by prompting in higher volumes repeatedly, you can kind of expose the average. There's no more rank because it's not predetermined anymore. So it's a probabilistic outcome. So it's what is the likelihood of HubSpot showing up in this eval over time and how does that change? And because the models supply the sources, the citations of where they got the answer from, you can see why and you can see the why start to change over time as well. In addition to that, we complement that part, that feature set with, we also have the largest consumer panel of real user prompts that we've gone and aggregated from third-party data providers. So this is a bit of a tangent, but 102 years ago, Nielsen created the first consumer panel for television. There are now hundreds of consumer panels that exist where consumers opt to have share some of their data, usually in exchange for some sort of monetary reward or access to something. So we've gone to all of those panels and acquired all of that data and built a very large panel of about 1.5 billion real user prompts. And that grows by about 100 million prompts, maybe 150 million prompts per month right now. So that gives us a good understanding of what people are searching for. And then in addition to that, we also plug into the customer's website. Via CDN integrations. And then in addition to all of that as well, there's the whole second part of the product, which is agents. So being able to create agents, you know, the 2015 version of Profound would have just been the analytics. But what if we can now run agents through all of that data and all of those insights and create agentic workflows that can actually extract insights, produce content, send you an email when something changes. And that's what's very exciting about the business.

I don't know if you agree with this, but I, I just think all of the analogies of SEO, it just falls so short for that reason. And I even don't like the terms GO and AEO to describe what you're doing because what you're actually doing is taking all these insights, then putting your content on autopilot. James, I know you guys have been hard at work for the last 3 months and you've rolled out agents, um, Agentic workflows for content creation. What does that mean for your customers and how's it going?

Yeah, I mean, it's been a wild ride. We've essentially built another company while we're working on our core product. But yeah, it's been quite surprising. So, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but Profound, we work with, I mean, quite literally the biggest companies in the world. Our platform is used by 10% of the Fortune 500. So huge enterprise brands using our platform.

I wish you were able to sort of list the logos. I know you can't list all of them, but just to put you in the room with the memo and the conversation with some of my partners as I was sort of spitting out the who's who of logos on the profound customer base, it's pretty mind-blowing.

Yeah, and it's a real privilege to work with the brands that we work with and we do not take it for granted. So we, you know, I really see it as our duty to be a technology partner to the biggest brands in the world as they want to enter a new era of marketing. Interesting thing for us is how willing and how excited these large enterprise brands have been to implement agents and agentic workflows into their stack. You know, they're not just using Profound as an analytics platform, they're actually using our platform to create quality content at scale. It's not even just content production, for what it's worth. You can actually use these agents within the platform to spin up most trivial marketing tasks at this point. So if you want to create the first version of a deck that pulls from all of the data nodes within our platform, you can build an agentic workflow that will go and take from your visibility score, your citations, do a competitive analysis, and then spit out key facts into a PDF slide via an integration with Gamma. Or for instance, if you wanted to take 10 YouTube videos that you have published and turn it into blog content, you can actually take that, just dump in the URLs, and our system will go crawl the pages, take the current transcripts, then reference a knowledge base that you've uploaded into Profound and create a net new piece of content. Yeah, I think it's just a type of software that couldn't have existed. You know, I mean, I was going to say 3 years ago, but frankly, it's really with the birth of these reasoning models. Which are about a year old, year and a half old. Talking to your investment memo, marketing technology has traditionally kind of sucked. I truly believe that because of the birth of LLMs and reasoning models, there is a generational opportunity to build for the marketing org what Salesforce built for the sales org. To build a workbench where marketers go to understand, manage, create, measure the content and the work that they're doing on a day-to-day basis.

Two years ago, people weren't even thinking about discovery in these answer engines. And today we can go from discovery to content creation to attribution, all in Profound.

If you think of judo, quite often the things that look like headwinds are tailwinds in disguise, or they're just Tailwinds inverted. I think AI slop is entering everyone's vocabulary now as we enter this world where there is an incremental cost of zero to create new content. It's very, very easy. If I wanted to create 1,000 blog posts to host on the Lightspeed website right now, I could probably do that. It's not hard to create content. But I think in this new world where content is cheap and easy, I think the new table stakes becomes quality content. So how do you create high-quality content? Dare I say content that's higher quality than if a human had written it at scale. And I think that's possible with reasoning models and a human in the loop. I don't see a world where you would ever have agents just creating content, self-publishing. There'll always be some form of human approval. And I think there's, that we're entering this new era where it's how do I create super high quality content that pulls from 100 different data sources to create something truly original and publish that at scale. And I think Profound's building the workbench where you can do that.

Yeah, it's funny. We're only a month into 2026 and I feel like the VC buzzword of the year is context. And I think you were actually probably the first person to say it to me, which is Content cannot exist without context, and all that context already exists within Perpound.

I think quality is a function of context. So I think the more context that you give the models, the higher likelihood there is that it's going to create something good. If you don't tell the models what you want, and what that means is by hooking up lots of internal data sources, external data sources, like very complex orchestrations of data input, allow the model to do a good job.

Makes perfect sense. Okay. I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about something that I know is important to you, which is your team and the culture you built at Profound. We spent 5 or 6 hours together on Saturday in your office, and I think people were sitting on top of each other and there's just this amazing energy in the office. And anyone who's been there would, would agree with me that it feels like people want to be there 8 days a week if you, if you let them. Tell us more about the team and culture and maybe start with your last name and the heritage there.

My last name is Cadwallader, which means battle leader in Welsh. It's an old Welsh name. I'm not Welsh. Our culture is pretty specific. You know, I sometimes say that we operate like a 2015 startup in that we're very much in person. I don't know where that began. I think it began probably very early on with Dylan. Dylan and I would, even when we didn't have a business to work on, we would go to SPC 6 days a week. If you speak to anyone in our company, they would say that it's a very hardworking culture, but in a very unique way in that there's no kind of top-down barking of how many hours did you work this week? It's not performative. I think that's really hard to balance. I think it's easy to go to either one of those spectrums. I think it's very easy to execute, we cherish work-life balance. That's an easy thing to execute. I think it's also very easy to do the kind of knuckleheaded 996 thing of like, rah rah, we just work, nothing else matters. All we're going to do is work and kill ourselves. I think to balance that, to find a sweet spot where it's like, hey, you're going to come here and you're going to do your best work, there's going to be late nights. A lot of us come in on Saturdays. It's not mandatory, but also you're going to do it because you want to. It's really difficult to build that culture, and it's something I would argue that to an extent our culture is the best product that we've built to date because it's very unique to us. We are super high agency in the way that we run the business. We We bring in a lot of young people. There's a lot of folks at Profound where it's their first job, and frankly, some of the best people in the company are people where this is their first job.

Tell us more about that. What does it mean to be a young person at Profound, and what have been some of the opportunities for people who have performed?

I think it's just jump in, and no one cares if it's your first job. Just, you're expected just to figure it out. And yeah, I mean, we have junior engineers who, new grads effectively, building software that's being used by the biggest companies in the world. And they get a ton of agency and they get elevated and promoted. Our head of engineering is 24 years old, very unorthodox, but yeah, he's also incredibly smart and he was formerly at AMD and he earned the respect of the engineering org and that we trust him to do a fantastic job. And frankly, I would like to work with him, which I think that's a Zuckism, but I think it's a good litmus test. Yeah.

Do you have this incredible ability to, when trust is earned, bet on people? And I think that sort of encapsulates what culture and people is at Profound.

Yeah. I think at my last company, you know, I ran a VC-backed startup prior to this as a co-founder. Admittedly, I wasn't CEO, But I think we, I learned that the hard way by, you know, bringing in sort of experienced execs who were meant to know what they were doing. I think you learn the hard way that no one really knows what they're doing. And it's not to say it's not a total disdain for experience. Like our SVP of revenue, Mark Ebert, is a monster.

And he is a monster.

Yeah, he's a monster. And he's like incredibly experienced. And it's like watching, you know, a master of craft go about their work. I'm learning so much from him. But I I think it's just not being dogmatic in that view that you always need experience and understanding where you can take a bet and where you can't.

You've now raised 3 rounds in 2025, and we got super excited. And honestly, thank you for letting us partner with you and our friends at SPC and Khosa and Kleiner and Sequoia. We're all so excited to be on this journey with you. What is, what does this sort of capital base allow you to go do now as you think about 2026 and beyond?

I'm going to define the category. That's the idea. I think when you look at these blue ocean opportunities, so if it's legal, you have Harvey. If it's customer service, you'd have Sierra and Decagon. If it's go-to-market, you might have Play. You have these kind of category-defining businesses. And yeah, our ambition is very much to build a category-defining business. I would like this to be the last business I work on, meaning, not meaning I have any ambition to retire, but I would like to build something that I can work on until I'm 60 or 70 years old and something that can transcend, you know, myself and Dylan and everyone that's building it today. Something that can, yeah, I think there's an opportunity to build a new kind of software, a software where you do the work and you can, you know, marketing is one of the biggest spends.

I think it's one of the biggest TAMs in the world. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a huge TAM. And I believe that in this world where every marketer is going to use AI to create marketing, I think they're going to need a place to do that. I think Profound can become that. So I think when the ambition is that big, you need a lot of capital to be aggressive.

Well, thank you for letting us partner with you. We're really excited. You've heard this from me so many times with What got us excited is, is sort of this mega trend around search and discovery. It's profound. And then it's you, it's Dylan, it's the team, it's the culture that you've built. Just excited to see what, what comes next. The world is moving so fast and we talk about this in, in our sort of internal meetings all the time that founder archetypes look different. They behave differently than sort of prior generations. And you told me a story about like a Jensen quote. That inspires you about how you think about orienting the company to these almost daily shifts. I was wondering if you could share that with us today and just help us understand how it informs how you think about planning for the next couple of phases.

Yeah, it was a quote. It was from the Acquired podcast, actually, or one of the Acquired interviews with Jensen. The tool track is roughly to the tune of, you know, how do you predict the future over and over again? And I think the way that Jensen, I mean, classically, the way that he answered it was, very inspiring. And he said, it's like you pick an apple tree and you hover around it because you think that's where the future is going to lie. And you're basically waiting for an apple to fall. And even if you're not the first to grab it, as long as you're the first to pick it up, that suffices. And yeah, I think we've got apple trees that we have our eyes on, whether it's advertising. And clearly there's going to be a huge opportunity in advertising, or that could be, you know, there's 100 other places that we're very excited about. The marketing stack is like wide and deep, and there's lots that you can do there. From my perspective right now, there's not a ton that you can actually do in advertising. I know this company is focusing on the long tail, et cetera, but I think over time it's going to become a more interesting space. And I think it makes sense for, you know, if we have thousands of marketers from the biggest brands in the world coming to one destination, Profound, to do the work, They're going to want to do the advertising through there as well. We're going to hang around that apple tree and wait for the apple.

See what falls. Yeah. And then what about commerce?

Yeah, I think commerce is a perfect example of another one. I think thinking about search today, we're creatures of heuristic and we're used to just information retrieval being the function of search. But when you think about it, if I ask ChatGPT for that insurance quote, the next obvious step is that I'm going to say, okay, cool, can you go and buy the insurance for me? So it's going to, you know, every company on the planet is going to need to think about not just being discovered by AI, but actually seeing these user agents that are crawling on behalf of the end user as the customer and ensuring that, you know, if I'm in, insert huge insurance company, that my ecosystem can be understood, navigated, and transacted by an agent.

James, you're starting your gold business again at the age of 18, or maybe more generally, any advice you'd give young startup founders from your seat today?

I would say if I were looking back to my 18-year-old self, the piece of advice that I would give is the market is the river, the product is the boat, and the team are the rowers. In that you can have Olympian rowers in a beautiful boat, but if you're trying to paddle up the rapids, you're not going to go very far or very fast. Conversely, you can have a very inexperienced team with kind of a crappy product, but if you're going down the rapids and you have a very good market, it makes life much, much easier. Yeah, focus on market, I'd say, is probably the advice I'd give to the 18-year-old me.

Yeah, well, I think in this case with Profound, you have the blessing of one of the best markets in the world. So a really strong river, an Olympian-caliber team, and then a stellar sort of boat to take you down the river. James, Thank you so much for joining us and doing this. I hope there are no surprises in the memo, but there might be. So please give it a read and I hope to see you wear that chain in our next board meeting in a couple of months.

Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.