For the last 25 years, companies have been fighting over ranks on Google. But what happens when people stop Googling in the rise of AI search and personal agents? Meet Profound, a company rethinking marketing and brand visibility (a field also known as GEO). Founded in 2024, the company recently raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, with more than 1,000 enterprise clients, including companies like Target, Walmart, Comcast, Estée Lauder, and others. Profound mainly provides three services: 1. It tells you what people are asking AI. 2. It tells you how your brand is showing up in people's AI searches. 3. Its agents help you identify gaps, provide recommendations, and actually execute (for example, researching competitors, finding content gaps, and writing or refreshing pages). The GEO space is very crowded, though. Profound is competing with newer AI search optimization platforms like Bluefish, Scrunch, and others. The broader strategic threat comes from companies that already own a large portion of the marketing stack, such as HubSpot, Adobe, and Google.

The next breakthrough in AI comes from millions of people playing video games. Meet General Intuition, an AI startup training the next generation of world models using gaming data, including both game visuals and synchronized player actions. Unlike traditional LLMs that predict the next token, world models are designed to learn how real environments work and predict what happens next when an action is taken.

"Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off." Steve Jobs