VCs Bet on 'AdSense for AI' with $20.5M Koah Investment
Theory Ventures led a $20.5 million Series A for Koah, a startup described as an "AdSense for AI." The investment thesis is that major interface shifts, like the move to AI, create new $100 billion-plus advertising markets, and that AI-native marketing platforms will capture this value.
- This Series A funding brings Koah's total capital raised to over $26 million, following a $5 million seed round in September 2025. - As part of the investment, Tomasz Tunguz, a founder and General Partner at Theory Ventures and a former member of the Google AdSense team, will join Koah's board of directors. - Koah's platform allows developers of AI applications to embed native, contextual advertisements directly into conversational AI experiences using a lightweight SDK. - The company aims to solve the monetization challenge for AI applications, where high inference costs can make subscription-only models difficult to scale. - In the past year, Koah's ecosystem has grown to over 2 million monthly active users, and it has delivered more than 35 million native ad impressions across 175 million queries. - Other investors in the Series A round included Forerunner, South Park Commons, and AppLovin co-founder Andrew Karam. - Koah is already working with AI applications such as Liner, Viro, and Sup AI to help them monetize their user interactions. - The company was founded by Nic Baird, Mike Choi, and Herrick Fang, who previously worked together at Affirm, Supermove, and Qualified.
