Kana emerges from stealth with $15M to build flexible AI agents for marketers

Marketing is one of the few operations no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have a veritable host of AI-powered marketing tools being shoved into marketers’ faces today. All the social platforms, from Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, and major incumbents like Microsoft and Google, to content-generation startups like Jasper and Copy.ai, offer AI tools that claim to make marketers’ lives easier in uncountable ways.

That was partly why I was confused to see yet another marketing AI startup entering the fray: San Francisco-based Kana just came out of stealth with a suite of AI agents that can do data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and optimizing for AI chatbots. The startup has raised $15 million in a seed funding round led by Mayfield.

But Kana has something going for it that most marketing startups today don’t: its co-founders, Tom Chavez (CEO; pictured above on the right) and Vivek Vaidya (CTO; pictured above), have been building marketing tech for more than 25 years. Kana’s actually their fourth venture after Rapt (acquired by Microsoft in 2008), Krux (bought by Salesforce in 2016), and startup studio super{set}, which they incubated Kana in for 9 months.

Calling this a “wondrous” time to be building, Chavez said there was a clear opportunity to bring their experience and today’s AI tech to bear on this class of problems. “We see a market that’s crying out for solutions that meet this moment […] We understand the space deeply, having wallowed in it arguably a little too long; having really stood in our customers’ pain,” he told TechCrunch.

The solution, as Kana pitches it, involves “loosely coupled” AI agents that can be tailored “on the fly,” integrated into legacy marketing software, and can simultaneously work on different operations. So a marketer could, for example, upload a media brief that Kana’s agents would analyze to figure out the campaign goals, search for the audience to target, and pull in data from inventory and market research to further tweak the plan. The platform bakes in autonomous campaign tracking, optimization, and reporting.

Alongside agents, Kana offers synthetic data generation to augment third-party data sources for activities like market research and audience targeting. This, Chavez argued, could help companies reduce the costs of using third-party data, fill in gaps in the data, and help marketers run tests on various platforms faster and narrow down strategies.

Kana says this is all done while keeping humans in the loop so that marketers can approve the AI agents’ actions, give feedback, and customize what the agents do as their needs change.

Chavez and Vaidya emphasized the importance of the platform’s flexibility, arguing that the ability to deploy, tailor, and build new agents in real time would let marketers see results on their campaigns faster than they would with legacy systems.

Going forward, the startup sees that very flexibility to customize its platform for customers, doubling as its moat against incumbents and other startups building similar products.

“We have the opportunity not to create bespoke solutions, but to highly tailor and configure these solutions to meet customers where they are. Larger companies just are never going to get there,” Chavez said.

“We live in a world which allows us to explore a third option [with customers]: not build, not buy, but build with — build with in a way which is supported,” Vaidya added. “We can move with insane speed that these big companies just cannot. And that’s our advantage.”

Kana will use the fresh cash to expand hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market. Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha is joining the company’s board.