AI Startup Profound Raises $1.5 Million in Seed Funding
Profound has already opened early access to its first user cohort and plans to expand its beta later this year.
Bengaluru-based AI startup Profound has raised $1.5 million in seed funding as it emerged from stealth with an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to transform professional networking, talent discovery, and recruitment through AI agents.
The seed round saw participation from Stellaris Venture Partners, 3one4 Capital, and several prominent angel investors, including Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy co-founder Nandan Reddy, former Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah, Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur, CRED founder Kunal Shah, and OfBusiness co-founder Bhuvan Gupta.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering and product teams, strengthen its AI capabilities, enhance its intelligent matching engine, and scale its platform as it targets onboarding one million professionals globally before a wider beta launch.
Founded by Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar, both former product and technology leaders with experience across Swiggy, Zomato, Flipkart, Cleartrip, Ola, and Walmart Labs, Profound is building what it describes as an AI-native professional network, replacing traditional profiles and resumes with AI-powered digital representatives.
The platform creates an AI representative for every professional through an initial voice-based conversation that captures an individual’s experience, skills, working style, career goals, and professional preferences. Using these insights, the AI continuously recommends relevant career opportunities, identifies meaningful professional connections, and facilitates high-quality introductions.
For employers, Profound enables hiring managers to create AI representatives for open positions and hiring teams. Instead of relying on conventional job descriptions, recruiters can describe hiring requirements through natural voice conversations, allowing the platform to match candidates based on skills, experience, context, and organisational fit rather than keyword-based resume screening.
The company believes this AI-first approach can significantly improve how professionals discover opportunities while helping organisations identify better-qualified candidates through richer contextual understanding.