Koah Labs attracts 295 billion KRW investment through "AI advertising"… Accelerating generative AI innovation

Koah Labs has raised $20.5 million in Series A funding for its “AI version of AdSense” platform. The company aims to drive innovation in contextual advertising within generative AI technology, with this round led by Theory Ventures. Building on $5 million in seed funding, this financing brings Koah Labs’ total funding to over $26 million.

Koah Labs co-founder and CEO Nick Beld explained, “Generative AI is changing the way people consume information, and revenue models need to evolve accordingly.” He added, “Subscription models lack scalability due to high inference costs, and traditional advertising can harm user experience.”

Recently, OpenAI began embedding ads into ChatGPT, leading to some shifts in related discussions. OpenAI researcher Joe Sitchik resigned in opposition to the company’s advertising decisions, expressing concerns that “collecting sensitive information from large audiences could be used to manipulate users.”

Against this backdrop, Koah offers a software development kit that enables developers to integrate AI features into applications and monetize them. This provides responsible monetization opportunities for developers observing that AI tools can directly influence brand preferences.

To ensure ads do not disrupt the conversation flow, Koah’s ads are inserted between dialogues and clearly labeled as “ads.” The strategy is to display relevant ads when users ask questions, providing advertising in a way that does not undermine trust and aims to address manipulation concerns.

Koah Labs plans to use the new funds to expand its engineering team and marketing infrastructure to strengthen its technological foundation in AI monetization.