San Francisco Startup Kana Raises $15 Million to Build AI Agent Platform for Marketing
based startup Kana has emerged from stealth mode after raising $15 million in a seed funding round led by Mayfield, aiming to develop an AI agent platform tailored for the marketing sector.
The company offers a suite of AI agents capable of performing tasks such as data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, media planning, and customer engagement optimization. The platform also enhances content to align with AI-powered conversational applications.
Kana is led by CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya, who together bring more than 25 years of experience in marketing technology. They previously co-founded Rapt, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008, and Krux, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. They also launched startup studio super{set}, which incubated Kana for nine months prior to its official launch.
The platform is built on “loosely coupled” agents that can be customized in real time and integrated with traditional marketing systems, enabling multiple tasks to be executed simultaneously. For example, the system can analyze an advertising brief, define objectives, identify target audiences, pull market and inventory data to optimize planning, and automatically track performance and generate reports.
Kana also provides synthetic data generation capabilities to enrich external data sources, helping companies reduce data acquisition costs, fill information gaps, and accelerate strategy testing across platforms.
The company emphasized that human oversight remains central to the workflow, allowing marketers to review agent actions, provide feedback, and adjust operations as business needs evolve.
Kana plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, product, and marketing teams. Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha will also join the company’s board of directors.