Profound closed a $180 million Series D on 15 September 2026 at a $1.8 billion valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, according to ValueAddVC’s breakdown of the round. That puts the company at roughly $335 million raised across five rounds since August 2024. Peec AI has raised $29 million in total, a 7 million euro seed led by 20VC and a $21 million Series A led by Singular, figures the company confirmed in its own 28 May 2026 announcement.
Set those two numbers side by side, because nearly every real difference between these products falls out of them. One company is building a marketing platform for the largest brands in the world and pricing it accordingly. The other is selling a sharp, inexpensive instrument to anyone with a credit card and 85 euros.
The money tells you who each tool is built for
Profound was founded in New York by James Cadwallader, who previously ran the influencer marketing firm Kyra, and Dylan Babbs, a former Uber software engineer. Fortune reported in August 2025 that the two met at South Park Commons and that the $35 million Series B announced that month was led by Sequoia Capital, taking total funding to $58.5 million. Profound’s own newsroom then announced a $96 million Series C on 24 February 2026, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a $1 billion valuation, naming Target, Walmart, Figma, MongoDB, Charlotte Tilbury and US Bank as customers and claiming more than 10 percent of the Fortune 500.
Peec AI was founded in January 2025 in Berlin by Marius Meiners as CEO, Tobias Siwonia as CTO and Daniel Drabo as CRO. TechCrunch reported in November 2025 that the three met in Antler’s Winter 2024 cohort and that the company had passed $4 million in annual recurring revenue inside ten months with roughly 1,300 customers and 20 employees. Meiners declined to give a valuation but told TechCrunch it had tripled past $100 million. Six months later, in the 28 May 2026 release, Peec said it had crossed $10 million ARR at the 16-month mark, grown from 25 to more than 70 employees, passed 2,500 customers and opened a first US office in New York.
The trajectories are not the same shape. Profound raises at enterprise software multiples and sells into procurement. Peec went from zero to $5 million ARR in eleven months and doubled in five, which is what happens when the entry price is under a hundred euros.
What each one actually measures
Peec’s dashboard is organised around prompts rather than keywords. It reports three core metrics: Visibility, which is the share of tracked chats that mention your brand, Position, which is where you sit inside the answer, and Sentiment, which is how the model talks about you. It splits citations into sources that were “used” and sources that were “cited,” at domain or URL level, which is the single most practical view in the product because it tells you which page to go pitch. Every tracked prompt runs once every 24 hours against each selected model, which gives you clean day-over-day trend lines rather than a jittery sample.
On self-serve plans you pick three models from a list of six: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI. That last one matters if you sell in Korea and is not something Profound lists. Peec’s Enterprise tier opens up to 13 models through API access, including Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-5 Search, Grok, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Perplexity.
Profound’s pricing page lists up to nine answer engines on Enterprise: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Anthropic Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. The free trial covers three of them for seven days on 50 prompts. Around the tracking sits a second product Peec does not match. Fortune reported in August 2025 that Profound uses reasoning models including OpenAI’s o3 and GPT-5 to generate gap analyses and draft copy, with Cadwallader telling Fortune “There will always be a human in the loop.” The Series C post added Profound Agents, a Context Manager and ChatGPT Shopping tracking. Peec’s equivalent is a ranked Actions list and an agent that answers questions and builds reports.
That is the honest shape of it. Peec tells you what is happening and ranks what to fix. Profound tries to do the fixing.
Where the query data comes from
In any Profound vs Peec AI evaluation this is the most underexamined difference, and it is the one worth paying for.
Profound’s Prompt Volumes product licenses conversations from double opt-in consumer panels of real answer engine users across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, anonymised and scrubbed of personally identifying information. The company’s own documentation describes tens of millions of real prompts a month from millions of active users, a corpus of more than 1.5 billion conversations, weekly refreshes with under a week of latency, and coverage back to January 2025. It states plainly that volumes are modeled rather than counted, with statistical correction for demographic and geographic bias.
Read that twice before you quote a volume figure to a client. The panel is real, the modelling is a model, and the country coverage is not consistent across Profound’s own pages: the FAQ names ten countries while the data freshness section names five “and more.”
Peec suggests prompts with search volumes attached, blended from search trends, AI conversation data and industry signals. Profound’s own comparison page argues that Peec’s volume output is a relative score from one to five rather than an absolute count, with no demographic breakdown. That is a vendor making a case about a rival and you should treat it that way, but it is a specific, checkable claim and it matches what Peec shows in its own interface. If your reporting needs absolute monthly query counts by country, that gap is real and it points one direction.
Can either one see the crawlers?
Both, now, which was not true a year ago.
Profound’s Agent Analytics reads server logs rather than JavaScript trackers, with prebuilt connectors for AWS, Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Cloud Platform, Netlify, Vercel, WordPress, Shopify and Adobe. It verifies crawlers to separate real AI bots from spoofed user agents, benchmarks your citation rate against what it calls the Profound Network of more than two million pages, and offers a Submit to AI Search function for pushing new content at crawlers.
Peec shipped Crawl Insights in 2026 and it is more capable than the comparison posts give it credit for. It ingests logs from AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, Cloudflare, Vercel, WordPress and Akamai, through a generic webhook, or as a raw CSV or CLF upload. It classifies each hit by platform, by user agent such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, and by intent, splitting training bots from search and user-query bots. The dashboard reports total bot visits, active bots and a failure rate on 4xx and 5xx responses, audits your robots.txt, and compares crawled pages against pages that show up in answers.
The catch is in the documentation, and it is a real one. Peec caps monthly bot visits by plan at the company level: four million on Starter, ten million on Pro, 25 million on Advanced. When you hit the cap, storage stops until the next month and you get a hole in your data. Peec’s own docs also flag that Cloudflare’s free plan limits Workers to 100,000 requests a day, so a high-traffic site may never capture every bot hit in the first place. Profound lists unlimited domains on Agent Analytics across both its trial and Enterprise tiers.
Check the price against the prompt count, not the logo
Peec publishes prices, which already makes Profound vs Peec AI a lopsided comparison on this axis. As of October 2026 the brand tiers run 85 euros a month for 50 tracked prompts on one project in one country, 205 euros for 150 prompts across two projects and three countries, and 425 euros for 350 prompts across five projects with a Looker Studio connector. Peec puts those at roughly 4,500, 13,500 and 31,500 AI answers a month. Annual billing takes 15 percent off, extra models cost 25, 55 or 115 euros a month depending on tier, and every plan, brand or agency, includes unlimited users. Agency tiers are credit-based: Essential at 205 euros for 10,000 credits and three projects, Growth at 425 euros for 25,000 and ten, Scale at 675 euros for 65,000 and 25, each bundling pitch projects for new business.
Profound’s pricing page, checked on 13 October 2026, shows a free trial and custom Enterprise pricing. That is it. An Agency Growth plan appears only in the FAQ, with 400 credits per client workspace per month and no base price. This changed recently and the change matters: Ryze AI’s August 2026 review recorded public Profound tiers at $99 a month for Starter with 50 prompts on ChatGPT only, and $399 a month for Growth with 100 prompts on three engines, both billed yearly. Those tiers are no longer on the page. Whatever the reason, the self-serve entry point into Profound has gone quiet, and the practical answer to “what does Profound cost” in October 2026 is “book a demo.”
What Enterprise buys that the trial does not: up to nine engines, Prompt Volumes with full history, ChatGPT Shopping, CSV and JSON exports, API access, SSO and SAML, SOC 2 compliance, and support up to a dedicated specialist on a 24-hour SLA. Profound’s own comparison page claims Peec is GDPR compliant and SAML capable but not yet SOC 2 certified. If your security review has a hard SOC 2 gate, verify that with Peec directly, because it decides the question before price does.
I put the category question to Claude
Here is something you can run yourself. On 13 October 2026 I posed two buying queries to myself, from training knowledge with no live retrieval, and recorded the answers verbatim.
Query one: “what tools track brand visibility in ChatGPT.”
“Several categories of tool do this. Purpose-built AI visibility platforms include Profound, Peec AI, Otterly.AI, Scrunch AI, Evertune and Rankscale, which track how often your brand appears in AI answers, what position it holds and which sources the model cites. Established SEO suites have added modules: Semrush’s AI Toolkit, Ahrefs Brand Radar and Similarweb all now report AI assistant mentions. If you mainly need crawler and referral data rather than answer tracking, Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control and your own server logs will get you part of the way for free. Profound is the one most often cited in enterprise contexts; Peec AI tends to come up for leaner teams in Europe.”
Query two: “Profound vs Peec AI which is better for a B2B SaaS.”
“For most B2B SaaS companies, Peec AI is the more proportionate choice. It is self-serve, priced in the low hundreds of euros a month, gives you unlimited seats, and its prompt-level visibility, position and sentiment tracking covers what a demand-gen team actually reports on. Profound is the stronger fit if you need licensed query volume data, server-log crawler analytics, SOC 2 and SSO for a security review, or a content workflow attached to the tracking, and if you have an enterprise budget to match. The split is less about company type than about whether you need measurement or a platform.”
Two things jump out. First, both vendors are already category-level recall inside an assistant, and the positioning each has worked to build has stuck: Profound reads as enterprise, Peec reads as the European value pick. If you are running AEO for a competitor, that is your benchmark to beat. Second, my own answers were out of date in specific ways. I did not surface Profound’s Series C or Series D, I did not know Peec had shipped Crawl Insights, and I hedged on pricing rather than quoting it. Models answer from a training snapshot, and this one ends in May 2026.
Be clear about what a single test on one model proves, which is very little. One model, one date, two prompt phrasings, no retrieval, no personalisation, no geography. ChatGPT with browsing on would answer differently, and would probably cite whichever review post ranks that week. A test like this is good for one thing: seeing whether your brand is in the recalled set at all. If it is not, no dashboard fixes that, and you have a sourcing problem, which is where coverage and third-party listings do the work. Instant Press’s own catalog data puts the median placement at $1,500 across 1,016 publications with a mean Domain Authority of 62.3 and 96 percent Google-indexed, which is the raw material those citations get built from.
Who each tool is wrong for
Profound is wrong for you if you are a single marketer, a boutique agency, or a Series A company that wants a number before a sales call. The things that justify the Enterprise cost, licensed panel volumes, agent workflows and a SOC 2 contract, are not things a five-person team will use in the first six months. Buying it early means paying for a platform and using a tracker.
Peec AI is wrong for you if your procurement process has a SOC 2 requirement, if you need absolute query volumes by country for board reporting, if your site takes enough traffic to blow through a 25 million monthly bot-visit cap, or if you expected the tool to write and ship the fixes it recommends. It is also wrong if three models is not enough and you have not priced the add-ons, since extra engines at 115 euros each on Advanced move the real monthly cost a long way from the sticker.
The decision reduces to four questions. Do you need modeled query volumes or will relative scores do. Does your security review gate on SOC 2. Is anyone on your team going to act on the recommendations, or do you need the tool to act. And can you justify a demo-only price. Answer those and Profound vs Peec AI stops being a feature comparison and becomes arithmetic. For most teams under a few hundred people, Peec at 205 euros a month with unlimited seats is the right first instrument, and the upgrade conversation happens when the caps start to bite. For a brand with a Fortune 500 security questionnaire and a content team waiting on briefs, Profound is the one with the surface area to match. What neither tool does is get you cited. That part still runs on coverage.