Marketing professionals have a mountain of artificial intelligence tools to choose from, but the founders of a new startup called Kana Intelligence Inc. believe there’s still an urgent need for a platform that can adapt to user’s needs.

The company today said it has raised $15 million in seed funding from Mayfield to build that platform. The money will help Kana to achieve its mission of building a fleet of “flexible” AI agents that can automate tasks such as data analysis, audience targeting and campaign management, while ensuring humans stay on top of everything.

What sets Kana apart is its founders’ expertise. Chief Executive Tom Chavez (pictured, right) and Chief Technology Officer Vivek Vaidya (left) have already found three startups before, including two marketing tech startups that were eventually acquired by Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce Inc., respectively. They’re also the founders of the startup studio super{set}, which incubated Kana.

Chavez told TechCrunch in an interview that marketers are actively looking for more sophisticated agentic platforms. He believes that his and Vaidya’s decades of experience in the marketing tech industry means they have a unique understanding of their customer’s needs.

Kana has created a suite of what Chavez calls “loosely coupled” AI agents, as part of a dynamic platform that’s meant to work alongside human marketers. Its agents can be customized by users and integrate with existing marketing software to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. As an example, Chavez said, a user might upload a marketing brief, so that the agents can analyze the goals, pinpoint the ideal target audiences and then pull in data from the company’s inventory and research to refine the campaign strategy.

Besides that, Kana’s AI agents can also track the performance of campaigns, optimize them in real time, and take care of reporting, essentially streamlining every aspect of a marketer’s job.

Chavez said the vast majority of AI-enabled marketing platforms seem to be tools and infrastructure “in search of a specific purpose,” making them ineffective. “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,” he said. “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.”

Human oversight is a key feature and advantage of Kana’s platform. Marketing professionals will remain in the loop at all times. It’s their job to supervise the AI agents, approve actions, offer feedback in real time and adjust their parameters based on what they see, as their campaigns evolve. Kana also provides tools for synthetic data generation to augment whatever data companies already have, helping to fill information gaps and accelerate testing of newly customized agents.

Vaidya told TechCrunch that Kana’s aim is to meet customers where they are. Rather than build something in-house or buy an off-the-shelf product, they can “build with a partner” in the shape of Kana and iterate faster with extensive support.

Kana is directly challenging a “tool soup” problem that its founders say threatens to overwhelm marketing teams. Its focus on flexible, customizable AI agents with mandatory human oversight could initiate a strategic shift toward more tightly integrated and accountable marketing automation. If Kana succeeds, it won’t just be automating tasks but redefining the symbiotic relationship between marketing pros and AI systems.

The startup has a long way to go before that happens, but it has a plan to get there. With today’s funding now sitting in the bank, it’s going to grow its product and engineering teams and expand its go-to-market operations.

Photo: Kana Intelligence