With most new tech waves, consumers tiptoe in, needing time to warm up before adoption. But with AI, they’ve already blazed past the tipping point. Over 700 million people use ChatGPT weekly; teens are naming their AI companions, moms are meal-planning with AI, and shoppers, students, and savers are collaborating with agents every day. This time, it’s not tech pulling consumers along—it’s consumers pulling the demand curve forward.
New companies are popping up each day to meet this generational opportunity, and scaling rapidly. But, the elephant in the room for Consumer AI is monetization. The going standard is subscription, but that can quickly lead to fatigue and churn with a pile-up of new monthly fees for consumers across AI research tools, fitness coaches, and friendly companions they never budgeted for. Multiple revenue models in the Consumer AI space are an inevitability, and if the past decades of internet services are any indicator, ads will play a major role.
We invested in Koah because of the team’s mission to become the essential monetization layer in Consumer AI, reshaping how ads work for conversational AI interfaces. The platform enables any chat-based consumer AI company to become an ad publisher and serve highly relevant ads within the context of ongoing conversation flows. In turn, businesses can ensure their products are surfaced within the modern consumer discovery experience — a place of inherent productivity, where people are actively looking for recommendations and answers. The result is ads that are seamless and native to the UX — instead of interruptive — and actually helpful and relevant, personalized based on rich intent data from conversation history, as well as LLMs.
This unlocks a new class of performance advertising that blends the contextual relevance of search with the native feel of social, but embedded seamlessly within chat-based discovery experiences.
Koah’s early traction shows the sheer impact of this approach:
- 7.5% click-through rate, about 4x the industry average
- 4-5x better CPMs than Google AdMob and Apple Search Ads
- A publisher network that today represents over 80 million global users
Koah’s arrival is in the midst of a foundational shift in advertising. For the last two decades, advertising has been dominated by search, social, and display — all of which are optimized around static interfaces, clicks, and legacy behavioral data. But now that AI agents have redefined how people discover, evaluate, and make purchasing decisions, consumers often complete their entire discovery journey within a single AI app session. Precious potential ad inventory, indeed.
Despite this shift, the $1T+ global ad industry spends virtually nothing on this emerging surface area — because the traditional advertising stack doesn’t work here. As a result, popular AI apps are left without viable monetization, and advertisers have no scalable way to reach users in this new attention layer.
Koah fills that gap, and the founding team is uniquely positioned to take this on. Cofounders Nic, Herrick, and Mike launched a production-ready product within a month, shipping new formats every 2–3 weeks, and then lined up an eye-popping volume of pipeline while still pre-product. They have the scrappiness, smarts, and hustler mentality that embody success at the early stage.
With consumer AI adoption surging worldwide, we’re proud to partner with Koah as they build the infrastructure to monetize this generational shift.
