Profound raises $1.5M seed for AI professional networking
Bengaluru-based AI startup Profound has raised $1.5 million in a seed round to build what it describes as an AI-native layer on top of professional networking and hiring. The round drew venture firms Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital, alongside a roster of angel investors with deep operational experience in India's consumer internet ecosystem.
The angel syndicate includes Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy cofounder Nandan Reddy, former Zomato cofounder Pankaj Chaddah, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur, WhatsApp Global Head Kunal Shah, and OfBusiness cofounder Bhuvan Gupta.
Founded by Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar — product and technology leaders whose combined experience spans Swiggy, Zomato, Cleartrip, Flipkart, Ola, and Walmart Labs — Profound assigns each user an AI-powered representative.
The system begins with a voice conversation to map a professional's experience, expertise, work style, and career goals, then recommends opportunities and facilitates introductions based on that profile. On the employer side, hiring managers create AI representatives for roles and teams, capturing requirements through voice conversations rather than written job descriptions.
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"Just as actors have agents and athletes have managers, Profound gives each professional their own AI Rep," cofounder and CEO Anuj Rathi said in a statement.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering and product teams, deepen its AI capabilities, and develop its matching and introductions engine. It targets onboarding one million professionals globally before opening beta access to a wider set of users later this year. Early access for its first cohort is already live.
For global buyers and partners, Profound represents an experiment in unbundling a core piece of the LinkedIn value proposition — discovery and matching — and rebuilding it voice-first with agentic AI.
If the platform delivers signal quality that static résumés and keyword searches cannot, it opens a corridor opportunity: India's deep engineering talent pool, surfaced through an interface that makes cultural and contextual sense to Gulf and Southeast Asian hiring markets without requiring a traditional recruitment layer.
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