Dylan Babbs
Co-Founder and CTO
Profound
Dylan Babbs is the co-founder and CTO of Profound, a New York company that shows brands how AI assistants answer questions about them. Before founding it he was a design engineer on Uber's maps team.
A Design Engineer on Uber's Maps Team
South Park Commons describes Babbs as "a design engineer on Uber's maps team, the kind of builder who ships beautiful things on a whim." He met James Cadwallader there, and the two worked side by side before either had a company idea. In the incubator's account of the founding, the partnership came first and the product second.
Maps, Lithium, and a Change of Plan
Cadwallader told the Knuckle Up podcast that lithium mining stayed on the whiteboard for a long time because of Babbs's fascination with maps. He described Babbs as "one of the most ferocious product minds" he has met, with "this velocity that is rare to see in engineering," and said the two were complementary.
The idea that stuck came from Cadwallader's own switch from Google to Perplexity. Profound launched in August 2024.
Building the Instrument That Sees
The South Park Commons essay puts the founding problem this way: when a model answers a question there are no ten blue links, only one answer, and at the time no brand could see inside it. "James and Dylan decided to build the instrument that sees," it says. As CTO, he is the technical co-founder of a platform that monitors answer engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. For where this category sits in the longer history, see Chapter 7 of the GEO/AEO History.