Marketing is one of the few tasks in the industry that cannot be ignored. This is why so many AI-based marketing tools are really in the face of marketers today. From Facebook and Instagram to major companies like TikTok, Microsoft, and Google, to content creation startups like Jasper and Copy.ai, all social platforms offer AI tools that claim to make marketers’ lives easier in countless ways.
That’s partly why I was confused to see yet another marketing AI startup entering the fray. San Francisco-based Kana just woke up with a suite of AI agents that can perform data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and AI chatbot optimization. The startup raised $15 million in a seed funding round led by Mayfield.
But Kana is doing something that most marketing startups today can’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, following Rapt (acquired by Microsoft in 2008), Krux (acquired by Salesforce in 2016), and startup studio super{set}, which incubated Kana for nine months.
Chavez called this an “incredible” time to build and said there is a clear opportunity to leverage his experience and today’s AI technologies to solve these kinds of problems. “We see a market demanding solutions for this moment (…) We understand the space deeply, and we have really endured the pain of our customers because they have been locked in that space for so long,” he told TechCrunch.
As Kana puts it, the solution involves “loosely coupled” AI agents that are customizable “out of the box,” integrate into legacy marketing software, and can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. For example, marketers can upload a media briefing that Kana’s agents can analyze to identify campaign objectives, discover audiences to target, and pull data from inventory and market research to further tailor plans. The platform is responsible for autonomous campaign tracking, optimization and reporting.
Together with Agents, Kana provides synthetic data generation capabilities to enrich third-party data sources for activities such as market research and audience targeting. Chavez argued that this will help companies reduce the cost of using third-party data, fill gaps in data, and allow marketers to run tests faster and narrow down their strategies across different platforms.
Kana says this is all done while keeping humans in the loop so marketers can approve the AI agent’s actions, provide feedback, and customize what the agent does as requirements change.
Chavez and Vaidya repeatedly emphasized the importance of platform flexibility, arguing that the ability to deploy, adapt, and deploy new agents in real time allows marketers to see campaign results faster than traditional systems.
Going forward, the startup sees its moat doubling for incumbents and other startups building similar products as it will have so much flexibility in customizing its platform for customers.
“We have an opportunity: not to create custom solutions, but to highly customize and configure these solutions right where the customer is. Large companies will never get there,” Chavez said.
“We live in a world where we (with our customers) have a third option: build, not buy, build in a supported way,” Vaidya added. “We can move at incredible speeds that these larger companies can’t. That’s our advantage.”
Kana will use the new cash to expand hiring across engineering, product and go-to-market. Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha has joined the company’s Board of Directors.
