Kana, a new startup in the marketing technology sector located in San Francisco, recently emerged from “stealth mode” after securing $15 million in seed investment. This funding round was led by Mayfield Fund.
Kana develops software that allows marketers to effectively manage their marketing campaigns, collect and analyze relevant data, identify potential target customers and create effective media plans more quickly and efficiently.
Marketers already have many different technology options available to them today, including marketing solutions from some of the largest social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Microsoft, Google and others; as well as content creation tools like Jasper and Copy.ai. However, because they have such a significant amount of combined experience (over 25 years) developing various forms of marketing technology, Kana believes it can provide a differentiated solution to the marketplace.
The founders of kana, Tom Chavez (CEO) and Vivek Vaidya (CTO), have built three previous marketing technology companies together, Rapt (acquired by Microsoft), Krux (acquired by Salesforce) and a startup studio named super{set}, where Kana was first conceptualized.
Kana offers a marketing technology solution that combines technology with people; specifically, Kana offers tremendously configurable and customizable software agents, which are designed to be connected to existing marketing technology.
“We 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,” Chavez said.
“We live in a world which allows us to explore a third option [with customers]: not build, not buy, but build with build with in a way which is supported,” Vaidya added. “We can move with insane speed that these big companies just cannot. And that’s our advantage.”
Kana emphasizes that “people are still in control” of the marketing process and that they have the option to approve or disapprove marketing actions or input into the marketing process, as necessary. As part of its seed round of funding, Kana intends to use some of the proceeds to hire more employees; in addition, Navin Chaddha, a partner at Mayfield Fund, will also join the Kana board of directors.
