In a move that heralds the next phase of the artificial intelligence boom, Emanate, an AI startup focused on the harsh reality of America’s industrial supply chain, has come out of stealth. Backed by venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and led by Gen Z standout Kiara Nirghin, the company aims to modernize the “physical economy” through the deployment of autonomous revenue agents.
Nirghin, a Thiel Fellow as well as the youngest member of the board of directors of the Google Impact Fund gained support for Emanate from Peter Thiel himself, as well as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other prominent angels. Emanate, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2025 and is currently made up of a small, close-knit group of fewer than 10 AI engineers and product designers. Billing itself as the first AI revenue engine built for industrial materials companies, it expects its revenue to grow nearly 50-fold in the coming months as it deepens its design partnerships with major industrial distributors.
Emanate’s debut is part of a16z’s broader investment thesis that prioritizes companies supporting national interests, such as logistics, manufacturing and critical infrastructure.
Nirghin, who is also an AI researcher at Stanford and a former Google Science Fair grand prize winner, said she wants Emanate’s impact to go far beyond California. “So far, most of the profits from AI have gone to Silicon Valley. We’re bringing them to the industries that are building America,” Nirghin said.
For a16z, this investment underlines the belief that “the biggest growth potential for AI” lies in sectors like energy and industrial distribution rather than in traditional software. General partner Ben Horowitz, nodding to the recent A collection of 15 billion dollars (the largest ever), emphasized the need for American technological leadership: “In this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is fundamentally important to humanity that America wins…Our mission is to ensure that America wins the next 100 years of technology. »
Revolutionizing the Backbone of America
Emanate targets the industrial materials sector, a $5 trillion market comprised of distributors, service centers and suppliers. Despite forming the backbone of the economy, this sector has historically lagged behind in digital adoption. Emanate’s thesis argues that these companies are leaving billions on the table due to their reliance on manual processes. Since industrial distribution involves custom pricing, non-standard specifications, and complex processing services, each revenue-generating operation typically requires human intervention.
The consequences of these existing workflows are severe: inbound inquiry via phone and email is often lost due to slow response times, and pricing decisions are often made based on instinct rather than data.
In December 2025, Nirghin appeared at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco and argued that his generation, Gen Z, is AI native, viewing the technology more as a language than a tool to adopt. “We don’t plan to code from scratch,” she said. “We are considering coding with a side-by-side coding agent.” This is a fundamental shift in “how you write, how you take tests, how you apply for jobs or different applications, because it’s not coming from the bottom up…I think what it really means is that this broad level of use cases and applications that we’re seeing are really being pioneered by the younger generation.”
Emanate’s solution is a network of autonomous AI agents designed to manage these operations end-to-end. Unlike previous waves of enterprise AI focused on chatbots or simple automation, Emanate agents are able to convert inbound demand 24/7 across multiple channels, nurture existing customer relationships, and intelligently source new prospects by scanning web and industry databases at speeds that human teams cannot match.
“These companies deserve the same AI superpowers that tech companies take for granted,” Nirghin said.
The startup differentiates itself from other AI players in the logistics space, such as HappyRobot, by focusing strictly on revenue generation. The company claims its product can increase customer revenue by 60 to 80 percent.