GTM @ Profound. ex-MongoDB / Thrive Capital
New York, NY
Joined December 2010
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I’m eagerly awaiting the day I get on an Intl flight and I actually have starlink broadband WiFi (sent from united ShitFi)
AI marketer is cracked af. Hit up @profound to try it out
Excited to share @profound has raised a $180M Series D, co-led by @sequoia and @kleinerperkins.
Winning in AI Search requires an inhuman amount of work. That is why we are building the AI platform for marketers, underpinned by two things:
1/ Your AI Marketer, a marketing expert that proactively investigates your data, identifies opportunities, and then does the work while you stay in the loop.
2/ Context Manager, a living synthesis of your meetings, email threads, and brand data powering this new teammate. As your brand evolves, so does your AI Marketer.
AI labs are pushing the frontier in fields like engineering, law, and finance. But marketing, one of the economy's most complex and consequential applications, has received far less attention.
That’s why we’re expanding our applied AI research team. We’re bringing together research scientists, engineers, and IOI medalists to advance AI for marketing. Their focus: post-training models for marketing workflows, and building the world's first AI benchmark for real-world tasks in the field.
James Underhill retweeted
In the next episode of our new series Builder Stories, our friends at @profound share how marketing is changing in the age of AI.
0:00 — The rise of AI in Search
1:50 — Design as a Brand Moat
2:41 — How Profound Uses Resend
3:38 — Inside Profound University
4:52 — Email Logs and Debugging
6:07 — The Future of Email
6:57 — React Email and Tailwind
James Underhill retweeted
its never been more important to get into one of the 50-75 companies that matter in AI
the gap between joining a great company and a good one used to be 3-5x
now it's life-changing money vs. contemplating if you still want to be in tech sales anymore
the perceived fomo has never been greater
The best products focus on outcomes and create inspiration. Now Profound tells you what to focus on & does the work. Awesome ship 🚢
Today, @profound is launching Aim, the first background agent purpose-built for marketers.
For months, we've been obsessed with one problem: dashboards tell you what's happening, but not how to act on the data.
Aim is the agent harness designed specifically for marketing. Aim is trained from scratch on Profound's proprietary data, grounded in our research, and understands how marketers get work done.
Aim analyzes your AI Search data, Prompt Volumes, competitive insights, and Knowledge Base to surface the opportunities worth acting on. It finds the anomalies that matter so you can spend your time on what moves the needle.
Every Project comes with a data-backed brief and recommended tasks. From there, you can:
• Chat with Aim to refine the plan
• Deploy the custom Agent in one click
• Track progress automatically
Aim is your newest teammate keeping you moving in the right direction, working 24/7.
It’s too easy to create content now with Claude that I’m noticing tons of “work slop”. Content people created that’s formatted nice but you start to read it and there’s nothing meaningful there. Starting to give me a negative reaction just seeing that standard Claude format
James Underhill retweeted
With the Series C comes the launch of Profound Agents: Customizable, autonomous workers that collapse the time between campaign concept and execution. Profound Agents will 10x the productivity of the modern marketer.
Today, @profound is excited to announce our $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @lightspeedvp with participation from @sequoia, @kleinerperkins, @mattevantic, @saga_ventures and @spc.
When we started Profound 18 months ago, we had two fundamental beliefs about where marketing is heading:
1. Every company will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand.
2. Every marketer will use AI Agents to do their best work, faster.
Those beliefs are becoming reality faster than we imagined.
Now, we serve more than 10% of the Fortune 500 and are the number 1 leader on the G2 grid for AEO.
To double down on that momentum, we’re taking two big swings:
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: AI workers that take marketing teams from concept to execution.
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: certifications and cohort-based learning for marketers who want stay at the forefront of AI marketing.
Reply with 𝗔𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧 for free access to one of our most popular agents. No account required and no strings attached.
James Underhill retweeted
Today, @profound is excited to announce our $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @lightspeedvp with participation from @sequoia, @kleinerperkins, @mattevantic, @saga_ventures and @spc.
When we started Profound 18 months ago, we had two fundamental beliefs about where marketing is heading:
1. Every company will care deeply about how AI talks about their brand.
2. Every marketer will use AI Agents to do their best work, faster.
Those beliefs are becoming reality faster than we imagined.
Now, we serve more than 10% of the Fortune 500 and are the number 1 leader on the G2 grid for AEO.
To double down on that momentum, we’re taking two big swings:
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: AI workers that take marketing teams from concept to execution.
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: certifications and cohort-based learning for marketers who want stay at the forefront of AI marketing.
Reply with 𝗔𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧 for free access to one of our most popular agents. No account required and no strings attached.
James Underhill retweeted
Sequoia just called the end of an entire go-to-market era and most SaaS companies won’t realize what hit them for 18 months.
Product-led growth was built on one assumption: humans would try the software. The entire playbook since 2010 optimized for human discovery. Beautiful landing pages. Frictionless free trials. Viral invite loops. Slack, Dropbox, Zoom, Calendly. $200B+ in market cap created by winning the user’s first 5 minutes.
None of that matters if an agent is picking the software.
Claude doesn’t care about your hero image. It can’t be impressed by your Dribbble awards. It’s reading documentation, parsing user reviews, checking API reliability, and matching features to use case. All the surface-level polish that convinced lazy humans to click “sign up” becomes irrelevant.
The new PLG funnel isn’t landing page → free trial → activation → conversion.
It’s agent query → documentation scan → feature match → recommendation.
Which means the new moat looks completely different. You don’t need the best onboarding. You need the best documentation. You don’t need viral loops. You need structured data that agents can parse. You don’t need a beautiful UI for the first session. You need an API that an agent can actually call.
The companies that won PLG hired designers and growth hackers. The companies that win agent-led growth will hire technical writers and developer relations engineers.
And here’s the part nobody’s pricing in yet: agents don’t have loyalty. They don’t have switching costs. They’ll recommend Supabase today and something better tomorrow if the documentation is cleaner or the pricing is more transparent. The stickiness that made PLG so powerful, the network effects and learned behavior, doesn’t transfer.
Sequoia is telling you the entire distribution layer is being rewritten. The question is whether your product is optimized for human attention or machine parsing. Most are built for the wrong audience.
Sequoia partner @sonyatweetybird says we're going from the age of product-led growth to the age of agent-led growth.
"You see this most clearly if you're using Claude Code actively. It says, 'Hey, for a database, you should use Supabase. For hosting, use Vercel.' It's choosing for you, the stuff you should be using."
"Product-led growth brought us closer to the vision of 'best product wins,' but ultimately people are still lazy. They can't read all the reviews, and they kind of default to what looks cool on the website."
"Whereas your agent has infinite time to go and make these choices for you. It can go and read all the documentation, read all the user comments, and figure out [what you need] for your use case."
Some of my favorite people here. Worth a listen over the holidays to learn more about how agent of search is changing consumer behaviors
Customers now meet brands inside AI responses.
@thejamescad, CEO of @profound, shares how the company is rethinking marketing to reach millions as machines become the primary audience.
He also explains why Profound isn’t “SEO for AI,” and why hiring exceptional talent has become one of the toughest constraints for early companies today.
Tune into the full episode with @Joubinmir and @ilyaf. Link in the comments.
Game changer for marketers and brands. You’ve been waiting for AI? Here it is
Today, I'm excited to announce @profound Workflows is available in public beta to all enterprise customers.
The automation layer for content operations in the era of AI Search.
❤️❤️
When we launched @profound 14 months ago, we focused on driving impact for larger enterprises like MongoDB, Indeed, U.S. Bank, DocuSign, and Zapier.
We’ve since expanded the product to help businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re a seed-stage startup, a family business, or a Fortune 500 brand, Profound is here to help.
Profound is now self-serve. You can sign up instantly w/ 3 plans:
◆ Starter: $99/month
◆ Growth: $399/month
◆ Enterprise: custom
We will remain the #1 enterprise platform to quantify your AI Visibility and orchestrate content creation.
James Underhill retweeted
We've been cooking up workflows @profound 🙏 Stay tuned! Here are some snippets from the big picture
James Underhill retweeted
We had our first @profound user conference today in NYC:
Zero Click 2025
Was a total blast - thank you to everyone who came through
Let’s go @kayvz !! Huge launch
James Underhill retweeted
All companies run on IT.
But almost all IT teams are underwater.
The ones that aren't run on Console.
Console raised a $23M Series A led by DST Global Partners and @ThriveCapital to help leading companies like @scale_ai, @tryramp, and @webflow automate 50%+ of their tickets.
James Underhill retweeted
What @rabois calls barrels, Slootman calls drivers. Critical to hire as many of this archetype as possible.
