Every major interface shift finds its answer to meeting the needs of a massive audience in advertising : TV, web, mobile, streaming. Each is a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars market. AI will be no different.
Today we announced Theory Ventures is leading Koah’s $20.5M Series A, with participation from our friends at Forerunner & South Park Commons.
Koah is building the monetization layer for AI applications. As AI search reaches its tipping point, assistants are becoming the primary source of information for many decisions. But AI apps face mounting pressure to monetize without compromising user experience.
AI advertising operates differently than search or social. Inside a conversation, Koah’s system processes the full semantic context of a query in real time.
When a user asks an assistant “I’m training for a marathon and my knees hurt, should I switch to minimalist shoes or get more cushioning?”, the system understands intent, constraint, & decision stage simultaneously. The ad that surfaces isn’t matched to a keyword or a profile. It’s matched to a specific moment in a purchase decision.
Or consider a developer asking “I’m building an agentic app that needs to store conversation history & vector embeddings. Which database should I use?” Only within agentic coding can a vendor be there precisely at the right moment. An agentic app builder can provide inference offset by ads.
The result : 7.5% average click-through rates. That’s 4-5x the display advertising baseline.
Over the past 12 months, Koah has processed more than 170 million queries & 35 million native ad impressions. Publishers using Koah’s native formats saw 122% higher click-through rates than their previous display implementations. Liner grew DAU 454% while monetizing with Koah. Growth & revenue moving together, not against each other. Retention remained near 100% in live chat environments.
Luke Kim, CEO of Liner, put it well :
“Since adopting Koah’s ad formats, we’ve consistently increased CTR & coverage, without eroding any of the trust at the core of our product.”
The Koah team came through South Park Commons. All three founders, Nic Baird, Mike Choi, & Herrick Fang, were Founder Fellows. Before Koah, they overlapped at three companies : Affirm, Supermove, & Qualified.
This category will define the next decade of the internet. We’re thrilled to partner with Nic & the Koah team powering AI for millions.
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