Anuj Rathi And Prashant Parashar Launch Profound With $1.5 Million For AI Career Reps

Former Swiggy and Zomato leaders Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar have launched Profound, an AI-native platform that wants to give professionals their own AI representative, and raised $1.5 million in seed funding to take the product into early access. The company sits in a fast-forming part of the artificial intelligence market: tools that do not simply write messages or summarise documents, but try to understand a person's work history, judgement, preferences and career context well enough to act as a persistent professional layer.

The founder fit is the core story. Rathi and Parashar bring product and technology experience from Swiggy, Zomato, Cleartrip, Flipkart, Ola and Walmart Labs, placing them close to the talent networks, marketplace systems and high-scale consumer technology environments that shaped India's last decade of startup growth. Profound is trying to turn that operating experience into a new model for professional discovery. Instead of relying only on static resumes, keyword-matched profiles and recruiter searches, the company says its AI Rep learns through voice-first interactions and represents a professional's experience, expertise and context.

The seed round includes a notable group of technology founders and operators. Reported participants include Swiggy chief executive Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy co-founder Nandan Reddy, former Zomato leader Pankaj Chaddah, Razorpay chief executive Harshil Mathur, WhatsApp global head Kunal Shah and OfBusiness co-founder Bhuvan Gupta. Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital are also involved. That investor list matters because Profound's first challenge is trust. A professional may be willing to test a drafting assistant quickly, but allowing an AI system to represent their skills, judgement and opportunities requires a higher threshold of confidence.

The company's first promise is aimed at individuals: an always-on layer that can help users discover opportunities, build meaningful connections and create more value from their career context. For organisations, the pitch is that AI Reps can support roles and teams by capturing deeper context and improving talent discovery. The company plans to strengthen engineering and product work, expand AI capabilities and develop matching and introduction systems. It has also set an ambitious target of onboarding one million professionals globally before a broader beta rollout.

The market opportunity is clear, but so are the risks. Hiring and professional networking already suffer from noisy signals, inflated titles, thin profiles and biased search processes. If AI Reps merely repackage the same information more persuasively, they could make noise worse. If they can capture evidence of judgement, collaboration style, domain depth and working preferences in a structured, consent-based way, they could make discovery more useful for both candidates and teams. The difference will depend on data quality, privacy controls, user agency and how carefully Profound handles sensitive career information.

The founder-led angle gives the company a practical path into early professional networks, but it does not guarantee adoption. Professionals will want to know what the AI Rep can say, who can see it, how mistakes are corrected and whether it can act without overstepping. Employers will want reliability rather than clever demos. Profound's funding gives Rathi and Parashar room to build, but the harder test is behavioral: whether busy professionals trust a voice-first AI system enough to make it part of how they are discovered, introduced and evaluated.