Founders Behind Martech Cos Rapt (Microsoft) and Krux (Salesforce) Launch Kana with $15M to to Help Marketing Teams Accelerate Growth and Automate Admin Work

• Kana deploys agents for modern marketers and media companies that harness data+AI to automate old workflows and create perfect, personal experiences for every customer
• Mayfield led the seed round after an initial period of formation and building inside super{set}

​SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–​Today, Kana has announced $15 million in seed funding to help marketing teams harness agentic AI with their own data to ignite growth and unlock new efficiencies across their entire operation. Kana’s suite of agents gives marketers and media companies highly configurable, non-disruptive tools to automate workflows, improve decision-making, and adapt to AI-era consumer behavior. Furthermore, Kana’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.

The round was led by Mayfield after a quiet period of formation and suite buildout inside super{set}, an AI-native startup studio headquartered in San Francisco, CA. The capital will be used to expand hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market.

CMOs face an impossible mandate: adopt AI to drive growth while simultaneously cutting costs. Meanwhile, tech stacks have become unwieldy, first-party data sits stranded in silos, and platforms like Google and Meta provide diminishing visibility into what’s actually working. Marketing teams spend countless hours on busy work—building media plans, responding to RFPs, generating reports, inspecting dashboards, manually optimizing campaigns—tasks that cry out for automation through AI.

Having spent their careers in the boiler room of modern media and marketing, Kana’s founders launched Kana to exploit modern AI to collapse the costs and complexities of old workflows and finally deliver on the promise of 1:1 customer engagement. Leveraging proprietary techniques for Just-In-Time Data Integration, Kana’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 agents that actually do the work.

“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,” said Tom Chavez, co-founder and CEO of Kana. “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. 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.”

Examples of early customer applications include:

• Media planning: generates strategic media plans efficiently by leveraging historical performance and current context.
• Campaign optimization: monitors performance and recommends next best actions to improve efficiency across ad platforms.
• Market research & expansion: utilizes synthetic data-driven modeling to explore new segments and markets.
• 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.

Kana is the fourth company founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya together, marking the latest chapter in a long-standing partnership focused on building category-defining data and AI technologies. The duo previously co-founded Rapt (acquired by Microsoft in 2007), followed by Krux (acquired by Salesforce for $700M in 2016), the leading data management platform for Fortune 500 brands. They are also co-founders 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 is reimagining modern marketing by deploying purpose-built AI agents that actually do the work,” said Navin Chadda, Managing Partner at Mayfield. “At Mayfield, we’re a people-first firm, and Tom and Vivek embody what we look for in founders. 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.”

About Kana

Through the intelligent orchestration of highly aligned, loosely coupled AI agents, Kana enables brands and media companies to learn, predict, and optimize every step of the customer journey for faster growth and smarter business outcomes. Founded by serial entrepreneurs Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, Kana integrates with existing enterprise systems, structures marketing context intelligently, and deploys AI agents that produce reviewable outputs and measurable outcomes so teams can move faster and make smarter decisions. Backed by Mayfield, Kana is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Learn more at https://www.kana.ai/.

Contacts

Press Contact:
VSC on behalf of Kana
Natalie Bartels
natalieb@vsc.co