How Brands Stay Visible When AI Decides | Profound CEO James Cadwallader

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HubSpot cannot simply bolt AI onto legacy architecture

2025-12-22 · 5 company · 6 thematic

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james cadwallader

Co-founder and CEO of Profound, a marketing platform for the AI era that helps companies understand their visibility in AI search (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and deploy marketing agents. Serves approximately 12% of the Fortune 500. Previously built agent-led marketing workflows internally using Gong transcripts for real-time battle cards.

ilia fushman

Ilia Fushman is a partner at Kleiner Perkins who led the Series A investment in Profound. He previously worked in public cloud security and draws analogies between the cloud-native transition and the current AI-native rebuild of software categories.

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“It's like really difficult for just like pick on HubSpot for a second to just like throw on AI onto their product. It's just not the same. ... so much of it to me feels like it's because the primitives just are not what they used to be. So…”

—james cadwallader

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