James Cadwallader

Before Profound had an idea, Cadwallader and Dylan Babbs were working six days a week from a loft at South Park Commons in New York. In his account on the Knuckle Up podcast, he dragged Babbs in on Saturdays, banned laptops, and filled a whiteboard with Post-it notes. For a stretch the leading idea was lithium mining.

The turn came from his own habits. While researching those ideas he stopped using Google search and began using Perplexity, which he described as using the language model "to synthesize from the web." Profound launched in August 2024 on that observation. The incubator's own account of the founding, in an essay by Aditya Agarwal, says the pair met there and that neither arrived with the idea.

According to the South Park Commons essay, Cadwallader never went to college and spent a decade "willing businesses into existence, from commodities arbitrage to a media company with over a million users." Before Profound he co-founded Kyra, a London-based creator marketing company. On Knuckle Up he said Kyra gave him years inside the marketing teams of very large brands, and that he understands the marketer as a customer because of it.

Babbs, his co-founder and the company's CTO, is profiled on his own page.

Cadwallader frames the shift in one sentence: "In the old world of search, it was just this question of how do I rank? And in this new world, the question is not just do I show up, but how do I show up." Profound's customers include Walmart, Target, and U.S. Bank, according to the podcast.

He also argues that agencies stay in the picture: "I think you play alongside agencies," he said, adding that agencies use Profound to show clients how they appear in AI systems. The arrival of tools such as Profound is covered in Chapter 7 of the GEO/AEO History, which follows the discipline from its first service offerings in 2023 to the software that followed.