Koch Inc. Backs AI Startup Emanate to Automate B2B Sales

Koch Disruptive Technologies has made a strategic investment in Emanate, a San Francisco startup attempting to replace the relationship-driven sales model that still dominates industrial manufacturing and distribution. The undisclosed funding brings one of the largest private conglomerates in the United States into the fold of a company founded just last year.

The partnership signals a shift in how artificial intelligence is being deployed across heavy industry. Rather than targeting back-office cost reduction or supply chain optimization — the traditional focus of enterprise software rollouts in manufacturing — Koch is backing technology designed to directly accelerate revenue generation on the front lines of business-to-business commerce.

Jon Chisholm, managing director at Koch Disruptive Technologies, framed the investment around growth acceleration. Koch, which generates more than $125 billion in annual revenue and employs roughly 120,000 people across more than 50 countries, operates refineries, logistics networks, farm-to-market supply chains, and software divisions. The collaboration extends to companies owned by Koch, though neither organization would identify specific entities currently running the software.

Industrial sales have long relied on institutional memory. A typical transaction involves a buyer requesting a quote for a commodity part, with the supplier’s representative manually cross-referencing specification sheets, historical pricing, and inventory availability. Because identical components are often available from multiple distributors, response time and pricing accuracy frequently determine who wins the contract. Emanate’s architecture attempts to compress this process by layering software over existing enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems, consolidating fragmented data into a single operational graph.

Founder and CEO Kiara Nirghin describes the product as an engine rather than an autonomous agent or chatbot. Users direct the system toward a specific business metric, and the software determines the execution path. The platform handles account reactivation, pricing adjustments, and expansion autonomously, but only after proving its reliability through what Nirghin calls “earned autonomy.” The system begins with human oversight and gradually assumes independent control as it demonstrates consistent outcomes against defined targets.

To validate performance, Emanate uses controlled deployments, routing the engine to a specific subset of accounts while leaving a comparable group under traditional human management. Both segments face identical market conditions, pricing structures, and demand fluctuations, allowing the company to isolate the software’s impact. In February, Emanate reported that its technology could increase customer revenue by 60% to 80%, though it has not publicly released audited margin figures or named any customers due to confidentiality agreements.

Nirghin stated the engine has not made a critical error since deployment, attributing the record to the phased approach to automation. Doing nothing, she noted, carries its own risk in a market where competitors are moving faster.

The Koch investment follows Emanate’s emergence from stealth earlier this year. The startup secured initial backing from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Nirghin, a former Grand Prize winner of the Google Science Fair and the youngest board member of the Google Impact Fund, established the company in 2025.

The broader enterprise software market is currently undergoing a structural transition. Legacy CRM platforms built for human workflows are increasingly being retrofitted with generative AI features, while startups like Emanate are engineering systems where AI serves as the primary operator rather than an assistant. Koch’s involvement provides Emanate with immediate access to complex, high-volume industrial environments that serve as proving grounds for scaling automated sales infrastructure.

Emanate maintains its headquarters in San Francisco and continues to withhold specific financial metrics regarding its current valuation and total capital raised.