Ex-Delhivery, Cleartrip Execs Launch Profound To Bring

What happened

5 Mn in seed funding from Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital, as well as several high-profile angel investors Its consumer business focuses on solving representation and connection. It also has a B2B vertical to help startups with recruitment Ex-Delhivery tech head Prashant Parashar and ex-Cleartrip chief business and growth officer Anuj Rathi have joined hands to launch an AI-native startup Profound.

The platform then operates a proprietary matchmaking engine to proactively assist with networking. Finally, the amplification layer assists the user with building their personal brand and creating content that fits their identity. For consumers, the service aims to understand and articulate the user’s professional identity for use cases like resumes, job matching, among others. It also has a social aspect to facilitate networking.

Profound is also building a B2B side to help solve for startup hiring, Rathi told Inc42. The platform can help search for potential candidates, evaluate how well they fit in a role and identify points to be verified or examined further in their profile. While the consumer business will be subscription-based, the B2B vertical will charge companies a percentage based on the annual CTC of the positions to be recruited.

“We are starting with a few specific domains tailored for AI-first professionals. On the tech side, we are focusing on engineering, product, and design (EPD) while on the non-tech side, we are catering to professionals in marketing, sales, and analytics roles,” said Rathi. The startup claims to have already conducted 1,000+ calls as it aims to nail down its product-market fit.

Why it matters

The startup is building an AI-powered assistant or “representative” that can support individuals in their professional lives. Profound claims that it can create AI representatives for professionals across fields, similar to the managers employed by athletes, actors and musicians. After a 30-minute voice conversation with the AI agent, its system learns the professional context of the user, including their expertise, experience, working style, career ambitions, among others.

5 Mn seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital. Several angel investors including Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy cofounder Nandan Reddy, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur, CRED founder and WhatsApp global head Kunal Shah, OfBusiness cofounder Bhuvan Gupta, and Zomato cofounder Pankaj Chaddah also backed the startup.

Parashar, the startup’s CTO, has headed tech functions at startups like Delhivery, Snapdeal and Ola before he started up at Profound. On the other hand, Rathi led product and marketing at Jupiter and had a seven-year-long at Swiggy, scaling various initiatives like Instamart, Swiggy Labs, and Genie. The two have teamed up to launch a new venture at the intersection of recruitment, social media, and AI.

From a technical standpoint, Profound’s tech stack is divided into four layers – understanding, representation, connection, and amplification. The understanding layer combines voice AI, multimodal user interfaces, and a mix of large, small, and voice-specific models, including ElevenLabs’ models, OpenAI’s Sol, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, and Kimi AI. Then, the representation layer synthesises conversation data into authentic articulations of the user’s professional life based on the context.

What to watch

It has already made its product available to the public for users to have an introductory call with the AI agent, and will be rolling out features on an early-access basis in the next few months. It aims to achieve one million users who are actively engaging with their AI representatives within the next one year, per Rathi.