Kana has raised $15 million in seed funding to help marketing teams harness agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with their own data to ignite growth and unlock efficiencies across their entire operation.
Kana is the fourth company founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya together, a partnership focused on building category-defining data and AI technologies. The duo previously co-founded Rapt (acquired by Microsoft in 2007), Krux (acquired by Salesforce for $700 million in 2016) and of super{set}, a startup studio using data and AI to build transformational software companies that had a successful exit with Habu (acquired by LiveRamp in 2024).
Kana suite of agents enables marketers and media companies to learn, predict, and optimize every step of the customer journey for faster growth and smarter business outcomes. The company’s focus on augmented intelligence enables users to approve outputs before deployment and to correct and coach AI engines in the flow of work, so they can move faster without sacrificing quality, according to company officials.
Kana’s Tom Chavez Comments
CEO Chavez observed that modern marketers and media companies know they need to invest in AI. But too many of the available alternatives are tools and infrastructure in search of a specific business purpose.
“Kana provides a ‘third path’ by engineering custom agentic applications that solve specific marketing and data challenges in a matter of minutes or hours, rather than days or months,” said Chavez in a statement. “By understanding their priorities, Kana meets marketers where they are, integrates seamlessly with the tech stacks they already use, and activates outputs and outcomes their team can see, control, and approve before anything goes live.”
Kana Capabilities
Kana was launched to exploit modern AI to collapse the costs and complexities of old workflows and deliver on the promise of 1:1 customer engagement. Leveraging proprietary techniques for just-in-time data integration, the company’s suite of agents connects seamlessly to existing marketing and media systems, structures first-party data, campaign performance, customer insights, and business context intelligently on the fly, and deploys domain-specific AI.
Examples of early customer applications include media planning to generate strategic media plans efficiently by leveraging historical performance and current context; campaign optimization that monitors performance and recommends next best actions to improve efficiency across ad platforms; and market research & expansion to utilize synthetic data-driven modeling to explore new segments and markets.
Other purposes that Kana has been used for include:
- Synthetic data generation: leverages first-party ‘seed’ data to create larger reservoirs of synthetic data to drive more effective, more efficient personalization, targeting, segmentation, and measurement at scale.
- RFP/proposal generation and reporting automation:reduces recurring manual work that slows teams down, especially in proposals and reporting.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO):helps brands improve how they appear in AI-generated answers by generating and updating structured, user-facing content (e.g., FAQs, product info, knowledge pages) that teams review before publishing.
Mayfield Funding
The funding round was led by Mayfield after a quiet period of formation and suite buildout inside super{set}. The capital will be used to expand hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market.
Navin Chadda, Managing Partner at Mayfield, sees Kana as reimagining modern marketing by deploying purpose-built AI agents that actually do the work.
“At Mayfield, we’re a people-first firm, and Tom and Vivek embody what we look for in founders,” said Chadda. “They’ve spent their careers solving the hardest problems in marketing, compounding expertise with each company they build. We’re proud to partner with them as they create the intelligent layer that will power AI-native marketing teams.”
