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

Marketing is one of the few functions no business can afford to neglect, which helps explain why marketers are being flooded with AI features from every direction. Social giants like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are pushing AI capabilities, as are major incumbents such as Microsoft and Google. Even content-focused startups like Jasper and Copy.ai pitch AI as a way to simplify marketing work in countless ways.

That’s part of why it initially felt surprising to see yet another marketing AI company step into the spotlight: San Francisco-based Kana has now exited stealth, unveiling a suite of AI agents designed to handle tasks such as data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and even optimisation for AI chatbots. The company also announced it has raised $15 million in seed funding, led by Mayfield.

Kana does have a key advantage many newer marketing startups can’t claim: its founders have been building marketing technology for over 25 years. Co-founders Tom Chavez (CEO; pictured above on the right) and Vivek Vaidya (CTO; pictured above on the left) are on their fourth venture together, after Rapt (acquired by Microsoft in 2008), Krux (purchased by Salesforce in 2016), and the startup studio super{set}, where Kana was incubated for nine months.

Chavez described this as a “wondrous” moment to be building, saying that their experience, combined with today’s AI capabilities, creates a clear opening to tackle persistent marketing problems. He said they see a market “crying out” for tools that fit the current moment, adding that they know the space well from years of living through customers’ pain points — “having wallowed in it arguably a little too long,” as he put it.

Kana’s pitch centres on what it calls “loosely coupled” AI agents — agents that can be adjusted “on the fly,” plugged into existing marketing stacks, and run in parallel across multiple workflows. In practice, a marketer could upload a media brief and have Kana’s agents interpret it to identify campaign objectives, locate the right audience, and pull in information from inventory sources and market research to refine the plan. The platform also includes autonomous tracking, optimisation, and reporting to monitor progress throughout campaigns.

Beyond agents, Kana also offers synthetic data generation to supplement third-party data sources for use cases such as market research and audience targeting. Chavez argued that this approach can help businesses cut the cost of relying heavily on third-party data, close gaps in incomplete data, and enable faster testing across platforms so that marketers can narrow in on effective strategies more quickly.

Kana says it keeps people in the loop throughout the process, allowing marketers to approve agent actions, provide feedback, and shape what the agents do as goals and needs evolve.

Both Chavez and Vaidya leaned heavily on flexibility as the core differentiator, arguing that the ability to deploy, modify, and create new agents in real time can help marketers achieve outcomes faster than they typically can with legacy systems.

Looking ahead, the startup believes that same adaptability — tailoring the platform to customers while enabling ongoing configuration — can serve as a moat against incumbents and other startups working on similar ideas.

“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 plans to use the new funding to grow headcount across engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha is also joining the company’s board.