How AI Is Rewiring Marketing with Profound’s James Cadwallader

Alexa von Tobel (0:00)

How do you think about what the Internet looks like in five years?

James Cadwallader (0:04)

I think for the folks or the businesses whose product is content, it could be a very difficult period.

Alexa von Tobel (0:10)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Inspired. I'm Alexa von Tobel. Today, I have on James Cadwallader. He's the co-founder and CEO of Profound, one of the fastest growing new marketing AI companies, helping brands understand and control what AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bot, and Gemini say about them.

James Cadwallader (0:26)

As agents become the primary user of the Internet, and can share 100X, maybe 1,000X more content on the Internet than humans ever did, marketing teams globally are going to need to create orders of magnitude more marketing.

Alexa von Tobel (0:39)

Before Profound, he built Kyra, working with TikTok's biggest stars to understand the ins and out of human attention. Since founding Profound in 2024, he's raised four rounds, most recently $180 million rounds at a $1.8 billion valuation. When very clear that content and pictures and videos are created by agents, we've got to be really careful because the second, what I create looks and feels like slaw is the second people start to tune out. How do we avoid the slaw? I'm so thrilled you're building in New York City, so welcome.

James Cadwallader (1:09)

Thanks, Fab.

Alexa von Tobel (1:10)

Let's go back to the beginning. Let's just quickly, in plain English, talk about what Profound is doing today, sort of how you stumbled upon the product, and let's go from the beginning.

James Cadwallader (1:20)

Cool. I mean, in the most simple terms, we're building the Vertical AI Company for Marketing. So what we're seeing is Generative AI birthing big Vertical opportunities across everything from Legal, Finance, obviously Software Engineering. Marketing is a top three line item for every business on the planet, and for some reason, it's been ignored. I think it's because it's something to do with it being less verifiable than Software Engineering or whatever.

So yeah, I think it's more fragmented, it's messier as a category.

Alexa von Tobel (1:59)

Yep.

James Cadwallader (2:00)

But also I just think the smartest people in the world tend to gravitate more towards places like Software Engineering, etc. So marketing tech has for a long time been not the sexiest category. It's a bit of a crowded graveyard. Yep.

Alexa von Tobel (2:19)

I feel like Martech was pretty out of vogue for venture investing for about a decade too.

James Cadwallader (2:23)

Yeah, we've really noticed that as well as in our fundraising cycles. I think a lot of investors have PTSD around marketing tech, quite rabid.

But yeah, what we managed to do is build a very technical, very exciting pool of talent and yeah, we managed to build a team of some of the smartest people, at least here in New York, who are dedicating themselves to reinventing the category of marketing with Applied Air.

Alexa von Tobel (2:56)

I love it. So let's go back a little bit. I think from 2017 to 2022, you were building Kyra, which was a media company really aimed at TikTok. First, just like, let's talk a little bit about the business and how did you go from there? So focusing on marketing inputs and skills for real people on TikTok to now being truly the fastest growing company in MarTech, at the bleeding edge of AI, helping machines figure out how to put in the right marketing inputs to help people.

Kyra Media, what was that?

James Cadwallader (3:31)

I mean, Kyra was really the warm up. Very grateful for that experience. It was a baptism of fire. It actually started in a very different place. It was, we began in tech. So we was a consumer software business. We built a discovery app in 2014 that helped millions of people find cool things to do in the city. We started in London, we launched it in Paris. It was very successful. We couldn't monetize it well. So we went through like a sort of series of pivots.

Through a desire to monetize as a consumer app, we started meeting with advertisers, which then pushed us towards video. And that sort of pushed us into kind of going more down the media path. But we're trying to use software to kind of enable what had been a very human and capital intensive business.

Yeah. And I think, you know, the business is still going, they're doing well. I stepped away in 2022 I come with that business to the US and stayed here in the US through COVID. And yeah, it's really hard, you know, working with co-founders across time zones is very tricky. And yeah, I fell at the right time, so I stepped away in 2022 But really, Kyra, I think had I not worked on that business prior to this business, Profound, there's a lot, Profound's been a real rocket ship.