Today, @tryprofound is excited to announce our $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @lightspeedvp with participation from @sequoia, @kleinerperkins, @mattevantic, @saga_ventures and @southpkcommons. 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.

I’m really excited to share that I’m joining Benchmark. The past two years as a full time investor have been the most rewarding of my career. I really love venture capital, which is not something I ever imagined I’d say when I was kid, but here we are. I love new ideas and being part of a team with a mission. I love getting to be there for people who are struggling towards goals they really care about. I love learning from people who are better CEOs than I ever was. I love the texture of the work, the competition, and the way the job lets you invest in relationships. I love it so much that I’ve even turned into a little venture nerd with a podcast who goes around harassing great investors and founders, trying to learn as much as I can as fast as possible. I’ve certainly learned what I care most about, and what kind of investor I want to be. What I’ve realized is that I love investing at the Series A, when there’s enough going on that an investor can be useful but not so much that you can’t have an impact. I think there are many amazing ways to practice venture, it’s just the way that most speaks to me. And as I came to realize that, I started to think about how to best set myself up to do that craft as well as possible. It became clear to me there is nowhere better for this than Benchmark; the way they’re structured, their principles, their overall approach to investing, and their track record all create an environment that I believe will let me do my best work as an investor and help founders the most I possibly can. As I’ve gotten to know the team at Benchmark I’ve come to admire so much about each of them. Peter is truly playing his own game. A lot of what he says sounds like poetry at first, but as the ideas roll around in your head for a while you realize how much depth they have. I first heard about Eric many years ago from my friend Saji at Benchling while I was building Lattice, who described him as the most amazing board member and attributed him with a lot of the company’s success. That’s the kind of partner I want to be one day. Chetan is brilliant and truly thinks for himself; I’ve realized over time what a courageous guy he is. And then there’s my friend Ev, whose skills complement mine and who I just love to be around. I can’t wait to have him as a partner in crime. When given the chance to work with this group I just knew I had to go. One of my motivating north stars with Alt Capital was to build a firm and be a partner that I most would have wanted as an entrepreneur. Although I haven’t gotten everywhere I want to be yet, I’m proud of the work so far. And now I’m excited to build on that work at Benchmark, where I hope to increase my rate of learning and get armed with the power of a partnership so I can help founders reach their dreams even more. Thank you to the companies who’ve let me invest with them at Alt Cap. I’m keeping all my board seats and supporting everyone just the same as before. Thank you to the LPs who’ve backed me as well. I am so excited about the portfolio we have and am grateful I can stick with all those companies. And finally thank you to my teammates, Bala, Vivek, and Nate. Bala took a bet on me and started investing with me before it was remotely obvious, and we’ve been able to grow so much figuring it out together as investors. I credit Nate with helping Alt start feeling like a firm. He joined us from First Round over a year ago and made everything run smoothly. And while Vivek joined just a little while ago, even in the short time we’ve worked together he’s had a meaningful impact on how we think and invest. They’re all joining Benchmark with me. So pumped for this chapter.

We just raised an $11M seed to help developers build complex agents across any model and any tool in 5 lines of code. Our round was led by @KindredVentures (@stevejang) and @saga_ventures (@maxaltman, @braveben, @itsthomson). At @DedalusLabs, we believe the future of AI agents isn’t linear or deterministic. Agents should know when to stop, when to branch, when to reattempt a task, and when to pause and ask for context. As a developer, we make your job simple: define the prompt, select the right tools and guardrails, and let your agent run. We were tired of writing hundreds of lines of code and battling Dockerfiles and infra—all for a spaghetti agent that breaks under stress. With Dedalus, you don’t have to do things the hard way. Our open-source SDK supports vendor-agnostic model handoffs, chaining both local and hosted (MCP) tools, and streaming across any provider—all in 5 lines of code. Plus, our cloud infra lets you deploy an MCP server in 3 clicks so anyone can equip their agent with your tools. Let us do the heavy lifting so your agents can fly 🪽 Thank you to our incredible team and our early supporters: @c10n, @habibh from @e14fund, @YazanElBaba from @emergencecap, @donnystalter from @SunshineLakeVC, @karrwinn from @transposevc, @liquid2V, @fpvventures, @forwarddeploy, @AntWilson, @iamcal, @Thom_Wolf, @ashtom, @HazanPrinceton, @tri_dao

Woke up this morning and saw that Forbes put @Owner on the Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. It hit me hard. 🥹 I teared up, because this was a dream come true. I started Owner as a 17-year-old high school dropout. I didn’t know anyone in tech. But I watched the tech world closely. For 7 years, I’ve admired the companies on the Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. During all of the brutally hard times when we’d almost run out of money, or things would be going horribly wrong… I’d see this list and think: “One day.” That day has come. But it’s not because of me. It’s because of our amazing team. We’d be nothing without our great people. They deserve far more credit for where we are today. Owner has a really special team. I feel blessed to get to build with them every day. This is an exciting recognition, but it changes nothing. We’re staying hungry. We don’t take anything for granted. We work like the underdogs we are. We have to. Thousands of mom-and-pop business owners are counting on us. If you’re passionate about helping mom-and-pop business owners survive and succeed, we're hiring across 12 roles now. Check out our careers page.

We’re launching something new at Alt! It’s called Generate — a two month program for 10-15 B2B software companies using AI. altcap.com/generate

Excited to announce v(1.0) of Digi, the future of AI Romantic Companionship, for IOS and Android 🤖 Site: digi.ai Twitter: @digiaiapp A quick thread on features, and where we go from here (1/13)

Magill has resigned.