Marketing is one of the few operations no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have a veritable host of AI-powered marketing tools being shoved into marketers\u2019 faces today. All the social platforms, from Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, and major incumbents like Microsoft and Google, to content-generation startups like Jasper and Copy.ai, offer AI tools that claim to make marketers\u2019 lives easier in uncountable ways.<\/p>\n
That was partly why I was confused to see yet another marketing AI startup entering the fray: San Francisco-based Kana just came out of stealth with a suite of AI agents that can do data analysis, audience targeting, campaign management, customer engagement, media planning, and optimizing for AI chatbots. The startup has raised $15 million in a seed funding round led by Mayfield. <\/p>\n
But Kana has something going for it that most marketing startups today don\u2019t: Its co-founders, Tom Chavez (CEO; pictured above on the right) and Vivek Vaidya (CTO; pictured above on the left), have been building marketing tech for more than 25 years. Kana\u2019s actually their fourth venture after Rapt<\/a> (acquired by Microsoft in 2008), Krux<\/a> (bought by Salesforce in 2016), and startup studio super{set}<\/a>, which they incubated Kana in for nine months.<\/p>\n Calling this a \u201cwondrous\u201d time to be building, Chavez said there was a clear opportunity to bring their experience and today\u2019s AI tech to bear on this class of problems. \u201cWe see a market that\u2019s crying out for solutions that meet this moment [\u2026] We understand the space deeply, having wallowed in it arguably a little too long; having really stood in our customers\u2019 pain,\u201d he told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n The solution, as Kana pitches it, involves \u201cloosely coupled\u201d AI agents that can be tailored \u201con the fly,\u201d integrated into legacy marketing software, and can simultaneously work on different operations. So a marketer could, for example, upload a media brief that Kana\u2019s agents would analyze to figure out the campaign goals, search for the audience to target, and pull in data from inventory and market research to further tweak the plan. The platform bakes in autonomous campaign tracking, optimization, and reporting.<\/p>\n Alongside agents, Kana offers synthetic data generation to augment third-party data sources for activities like market research and audience targeting. This, Chavez argued, could help companies reduce the costs of using third-party data, fill in gaps in the data, and help marketers run tests on various platforms faster and narrow down strategies.<\/p>\n Kana says this is all done while keeping humans in the loop so that marketers can approve the AI agents\u2019 actions, give feedback, and customize what the agents do as their needs change.<\/p>\n Chavez and Vaidya emphasized the importance of the platform\u2019s flexibility, arguing that the ability to deploy, tailor, and build new agents in real time would let marketers see results on their campaigns faster than they would with legacy systems.<\/p>\n Going forward, the startup sees that very flexibility to customize its platform for customers, doubling as its moat against incumbents and other startups building similar products.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Chavez said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe live in a world which allows us to explore a third option [with customers]: not build, not buy, but build with \u2014 build with in a way which is supported,\u201d Vaidya added. \u201cWe can move with insane speed that these big companies just cannot. And that\u2019s our advantage.\u201d <\/p>\n Kana will use the fresh cash to expand hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market. Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha is joining the company\u2019s board. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marketing is one of the few operations no industry can afford to ignore, which is why we have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,3298,181,507,186,1275,6976,37541,220832,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-477634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-agents","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-exclusive","13":"tag-marketing","14":"tag-martech","15":"tag-mayfield","16":"tag-mayfield-fund","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}