Marketing is one of the few operations that no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have a veritable plethora of AI-powered marketing tools in the face of marketers today. From Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, and major incumbents like 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 myriad ways.
That’s partly why I was confused to see another AI marketing startup enter the fray: San Francisco-based Kana just came out of the blue 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 round of funding led by Mayfield.
But Kana has something most marketing startups today don’t: its 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 (bought by Salesforce in 2016) and startup studio super{set} where they incubated Kana for 9 months.
Chavez called the time “amazing” and said there is a clear opportunity to use his experience and today’s artificial intelligence technology to solve this class of problems. “We see a market that’s crying out for solutions that meet this moment (…) We deeply understand this space because we’ve probably been in it for too long; we’ve really stood in the pain of our customers,” he told TechCrunch.
The solution, as presented by Kana, includes “loosely coupled” AI agents that can be customized “on the fly,” integrated into legacy marketing software, and can work on multiple operations simultaneously. So, for example, a marketer could upload a media brief, which Kana agents would analyze to identify campaign goals, find audiences to target, and pull data from inventory and market research to further refine the plan. The platform bakes in autonomous campaign monitoring, optimization and reporting.
In addition to agents, Kana offers synthetic data generation to augment third-party data sources for activities such as market research and audience targeting. This, Chavez said, could help companies reduce the cost of using third-party data, fill in data gaps and help marketers run cross-platform tests faster and narrow down strategies.
Kana says it does all of this while keeping humans in the loop, so marketers can approve AI agent actions, provide feedback, and adapt what agents do as their needs change.
Chavez and Vaidya repeatedly 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 with older systems.
Going forward, the startup sees a lot of flexibility in customizing its platform for customers, doubling as its moat against incumbents and other startups building similar products.
“We have an opportunity, not to create custom solutions, but to highly customize and configure those solutions to meet customers where they are. The bigger companies just never get there,” Chavez said.
“We live in a world that allows us to explore a third option (with customers): don’t build, don’t buy, but build with — build with in a supported way,” Vaidya added. “We can move at a crazy speed that these big companies just can’t. And that’s our advantage.”
Kana will use the fresh money to expand hiring across engineering, product and go-to-market. Mayfield CEO Navin Chaddha joins the company’s board of directors.