Kana comes out of stealth with $15 million to build flexible AI agents for marketers

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

That’s partly why I was scratching my head when I saw another AI marketing startup entering the fray: San Francisco-based Kana had just come out of stealth with a suite of AI agents that can do data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and AI-powered chatbot optimization. The startup has raised $15 million in a seed funding round led by Mayfield.

But Kana has something that most marketing startups today don’t: Co-founders, Tom Chavez (CEO; pictured above right) and Vivek Vaidya (CTO; pictured above), have been building marketing technology for over 25 years. Kana is actually their fourth venture after Rapt (acquired by Microsoft in 2008), Krux (acquired by Salesforce in 2016), and startup studio super⚡, which Kana incubated for 9 months.

Chavez described this as a “fantastic” time to be building, and said there was a clear opportunity to exploit their expertise and existing AI technology to solve this type of problem. “We see a market screaming for solutions that meet this moment […] We understand space deeply, having been immersed in it for a very long time; “We really stand in our customers’ pain,” he told TechCrunch.

The solution, Kanna puts it, involves “loosely coupled” AI agents that can be designed “on the fly,” integrated into legacy marketing software, and can simultaneously work on different processes. So, a marketer can, for example, upload a media brief that Kana agents analyze to figure out campaign objectives, research the target audience, and pull data from inventory and market research to further tweak the plan. The platform tracks, optimizes, and reports standalone campaigns.

Along with proxies, Kana offers the ability to create synthetic data to leverage third-party data sources for activities such as market research and audience targeting. This can help companies reduce the costs of using third-party data, fill data gaps, help marketers run tests on different platforms faster and narrow down strategies, Chavez said.

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

Chavez and Vidya stressed the importance of the platform’s flexibility, saying that the ability to deploy, customize and build new agents in real time will allow marketers to see results on their campaigns faster than they would with legacy systems.

Going forward, the startup sees great flexibility in customizing its platform for customers, doubling its moat against other incumbents and startups building similar products.

“We have the opportunity not to create custom solutions, but to adapt and highly configure those solutions to meet customers where they are,” Chavez said. “Larger companies will never get there.”

“We live in a world that allows us to explore a third option [with customers]“We don’t build, we don’t buy, we build with — build in a supported way,” Vaidya added. “We can move at an insane speed that these big companies can’t do. This is our advantage.”

Kana will use the new funds to expand hiring across engineering, product and go-to-market. Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha joins the company’s Board of Directors.