In much of industrial America, a sale still starts with a spec sheet, an inbox, and a rep who has worked the account for 20 years. Emanate wants AI to do that job, and now it has one of the country’s largest private companies in its corner.
Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture arm of Koch Inc., is making a strategic investment in the San Francisco–based startup, Emanate told Fortune exclusively. Neither side would say how much. Koch is private, and Emanate said it doesn’t disclose investment size.
Koch, the second-largest private company in the U.S., runs refineries, factories, and farm-to-market supply chains, as well as software and logistics businesses. Koch said it generates more than $125 billion in annual revenue and employs about 120,000 people in more than 50 countries.
“While much of the conversation around AI has centered on efficiency and cost reduction, we believe some of the biggest opportunities lie in helping companies accelerate growth,” Jon Chisholm, managing director at Koch Disruptive Technologies, said in a statement.
The 20-year rep
Emanate’s bet is that speed wins. An industrial buyer can usually get the same part from multiple suppliers, so whoever answers first, with a better read on price, gets the order. The company says its software sits on top of systems suppliers already use and pulls that scattered knowledge into one place.
“Doing nothing isn’t neutral in this market,” Emanate founder and CEO Kiara Nirghin said in a statement.
Fortune previously wrote about Emanate in February, when it came out of stealth with backing from a16z, Peter Thiel, and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. Nirghin is a Thiel Fellow, a former Google Grand Prize winner, and the youngest board member of the Google Impact Fund.
“Before Emanate, customer accounts were handled per account, by whoever owned them, with whatever that person remembered and had time for,” Nirghin told Fortune in written responses. “Now they’re handled 24/7, with a full knowledge graph of every single interaction on the account.”
She doesn’t call the product a chatbot or an agent. She calls it an engine. “You point it at a business metric, and the engine figures out the rest.”
Emanate wouldn’t name a customer, citing confidentiality agreements. It didn’t share revenue or margin figures for any customer. In February, the company said its product could lift customer revenue by 60% to 80%.
Nirghin said Emanate measures results by giving the engine to one group of accounts and comparing it with the rest of the customer’s business over the same stretch. Both groups face the same prices and demand, so the gap should be the engine’s doing.
Nirghin said the engine can autonomously reactivate, manage, price, and expand accounts. But it doesn’t start out that way. “Our model is earned autonomy,” she said. “The engine starts with a human in the loop and earns the right to act on its own, step by step, as it proves itself on an outcome.”
Asked about the worst mistake the engine has made, Nirghin said there hasn’t been one.
“Because autonomy is earned and we deploy incredibly intelligently, it has never happened,” Nirghin said.
Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription for this article. The reporter independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication. This report has been updated with regard to Emanate’s client companies, whose agreements with Emanate are confidential.
