Live from NYC, it’s the Unicorner crew. 🗽

Make sure to join us for AI Day #NYTechWeek, a day and night experience at NY Tech Week built around the people and products shaping the future.

We’re hosting three firesides with founders and executives from Bilt, Bolt.new, and Graphite (acquired by Cursor), followed by a 30-person dinner for product, design, and engineering leaders, and capped with an afterparty featuring Ian Asher.

See you there.

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Koah is building advertising infrastructure for AI-powered applications, including AI search engines, coding assistants, video generators, productivity tools, and chat-based consumer apps. Its platform helps these products monetize by placing contextual, native sponsored content directly inside the user experience. Koah enables new ad-driven, non-subscription-based business models for AI-powered applications through a lightweight SDK that lets companies add relevant ad formats like sponsored responses, images, polls, and eventually video ads directly into their products. It’s a way to monetize growing usage without requiring every user to become a paid subscriber.

Check it out: koahlabs.com

Sorry, SaaS. It's not personal.

It's that the future showed up early, the way it did for the horse and carriage.

Now anyone can build the thing they wish existed: a CRM for your client list, an internal tracker your team will actually use, an admin dashboard for the side business.

No engineering team. No six-month roadmap. Just an idea and a browser tab.

There's an entrepreneur in everyone. Bolt.new is how you finally act on it - and today they’re helping over ten million people ship what's next.

The best part? The first 25 readers get a month free.

This is sponsored content.

Koah makes money by taking 30% of each placement. This gives AI apps a new monetization channel while allowing advertisers to reach users at moments when they are actively asking questions and researching options.

For example, if an online learning platform pays $100 to place a sponsored ad inside an AI education or productivity chatbot, Koah would keep $30, and the AI app would receive $70. Koah’s value comes from matching advertisers with relevant AI products while making sponsored content feel native instead of disruptive.

Koah was founded in 2024 by Nic Baird, Mike Choi, and Herrick Fang. The founding team came together through South Park Commons, a community of technologists and builders dedicated to helping each other explore and figure out what's next. 

There, Baird moved from SPC team member to community member before joining the SPC Founder Fellowship with Choi and Fang. Choi previously helped build products at Google, Apple, Twitter, and X, while Fang brings prior experience as a senior software engineer at Affirm, Supermove, and Qualified.

Baird’s path was more unconventional: before Koah, he was a competitive sailor.  His career path shifted to a GTM operator role, building experience across sales, marketing, and product positioning before focusing on SaaS consulting. From there, he joined South Park Commons and eventually co-founded Koah.

The idea for Koah came from a problem the founders encountered through South Park Commons, where they were surrounded by early-stage startups building in AI.

As AI products gained usage, the team saw a growing gap between user adoption and monetization: many products were expensive to operate, but subscriptions alone were not always enough to support that usage. At the same time, smaller AI companies often lack the resources to build end-to-end advertising infrastructure internally. 

The trio recognized a gap between how quickly AI products were growing and how underdeveloped the monetization infrastructure for this context still was. Koah was created to solve that problem.

Koah is interesting because it sits at the center of one of the biggest questions in AI right now: how will generative AI applications make money? The company’s betting that native advertising will become a major monetization model for AI apps. 

Many consumer AI products are expensive to operate because model inference is usage-based, meaning costs increase with every query or generated output, even when the user is not paying. Yet the user base is massive and largely unpaid, with estimates that more than 1 billion people use AI every month but only about 2% of U.S. households pay for generative AI subscriptions. 

This gap supports Koah’s bet that AI products will need ways to monetize usage beyond paid subscribers. Subscriptions may work for some products, but not every user wants to pay monthly for every AI tool they use. 

Koah’s premise is compelling because it is building ad formats around the way people already use AI products: asking questions, comparing options, and making decisions inside conversational interfaces. Rather than relying on traditional banner ads or static placements, Koah’s formats are designed to feel contextual and native to the product experience. That matters because AI products rely heavily on trust. If ads feel random or intrusive, users lose confidence in the product.

Besides, Koah also has strong timing. The company entered the market before AI advertising became an obvious category, giving it a chance to build early publisher and advertiser relationships while the market was still forming. More broadly, AI adoption is accelerating and projected to grow by more than $310 billion from 2026 to 2030. This matters because as more user activity shifts into AI products, advertisers will need new ways to reach those users, and AI companies will need new ways to monetize that growing usage.

It’s worth highlighting that Koah is not trying to compete directly with OpenAI’s own ad products. Instead, it is focused on the broader market of smaller and mid-sized AI products that need monetization but lack the scale to build their own ad network.

The closest analogy is Google AdSense: a plug-in monetization layer that helps websites turn traffic into ad revenue. Alphabet’s Google Network business, which includes AdSense, AdMob, and Google Ad Manager, still generates tens of billions of dollars annually, showing how valuable a scaled publisher ad network can become. Koah is trying to build the AI-native version of that model.

There are still risks. The AI advertising market will likely become competitive as larger platforms and other startups move into the space. Koah will also need to keep proving that its ads improve monetization without weakening user trust. OpenAI’s rollout of ChatGPT ads illustrates the challenge. Ads are delineated from organic answers, and are designed not to influence responses, but the rollout has still sparked debate over whether advertising can coexist with trusted AI conversations. Koah faces the same challenge of proving that ads can improve monetization without weakening the trust that makes AI products useful in the first place.

Still, Koah has a strong thesis. AI conversations, and thus Koah, may become one of the next major advertising surfaces, similar to how search created Google’s ad business and social feeds created Meta’s. 

ICYMI: We recently announced our official investor syndicate. Check out the announcement post for more details on how to invest in our deals.