Koah has raised $20.5 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-native advertising infrastructure, positioning itself as what it calls the “AdSense for AI.” The round was led by Theory Ventures and brings the company’s total funding to more than $26 million following a $5 million seed round in September 2025.
As part of the investment, Tomasz Tunguz, Founder and General Partner of Theory Ventures and a Google AdSense alum, will join Koah’s board of directors.
Koah enables contextual advertising embedded directly within generative AI chat experiences. Its lightweight SDK integrates with AI applications in minutes, enabling developers to serve native advertising from premium brands within conversational environments. The company says its model is designed to preserve user trust while unlocking revenue from high-intent interactions occurring within AI tools.
The company argues that subscription-only business models struggle to scale due to high inference costs, while traditional advertising formats can degrade user experience inside AI interfaces. Koah’s approach is intended to align incentives among developers, advertisers, and users by delivering context-aware ads that feel native to AI conversations.
Over the past 12 months, Koah reports scaling its ecosystem to more than 2 million monthly active users, with users engaging with conversational AI an average of three times per day. The platform has delivered more than 35 million native ad impressions across 175 million queries.
Koah is already working with high-engagement AI applications, including Liner, Viro, and Sup AI. These integrations allow developers to monetize in-product research and comparison moments as users interact with AI tools.
For advertisers, Koah offers access to users within real-time conversational contexts, enabling brands to align messaging with what users are actively researching or evaluating inside AI search and chat environments.
The new funding will be used to expand engineering and go-to-market teams as Koah builds out its broader technology stack. The company is also rolling out analytics tools to measure user engagement and ad performance within AI search and chat, along with new ad formats designed specifically for generative environments.
KEY QUOTES:
“Generative AI has changed how people consume information, and monetization must evolve alongside it. Subscriptions models alone don’t scale given high inference costs, and legacy ad models erode user experience. At Koah, we’re designing monetization infrastructure specifically for AI that’s additive for end users and revenue-driving for developers.”
Nic Baird, Co-Founder and CEO of Koah
“We’re seeing users research, compare, and form brand preferences directly inside AI tools. Koah lets developers monetize those moments responsibly—without compromising trust.”
Luke Kim, CEO of Liner
“Koah found a way to deliver AI-native ads that our user community actively welcomes.”
Nick Arbuckle, Founder of Viro
“AI apps represent a new interface layer for the internet, and they require monetization infrastructure designed for that reality. We partnered with Koah because of their team and how they’re building that layer to align incentives across developers, advertisers, and users.”
Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures
