Exclusive: Peter Thiel-backed industrial AI startup emerges from stealth in a16z ‘American Dynamism’ push
In a move that signals the next phase of the artificial intelligence boom, Emanate, an AI startup focused on the gritty reality of America’s industrial supply chain, has emerged from 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 board member of the Google Impact Fund, has won backing for Emanate from Thiel himself, as well as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and other prominent angels. San Francisco-based Emanate was founded in 2025 and is currently built by a small tight-knit group of under 10 AI engineers and product designers. Billing itself as “the first AI revenue engine built for industrial materials companies, it projects its revenue to grow nearly 50-fold in the coming months as it deepens design partnerships with leading industrial distributors.
Emanate’s debut is part of a16z’s $1.1 billion “American Dynamism fund,” an investment thesis that prioritizes companies supporting national interests, such as logistics, industrials, and critical infrastructure.
Nirghin, who is also a Stanford AI researcher and former Grand Prize winner of the Google Science Fair, said she wants Emanate’s impact to go far beyond California. “So far, most AI benefits have gone to Silicon Valley. We’re bringing them to the industries that build America,” said Nirghin.
For a16z, the investment underscores a belief that the “biggest remaining AI upside” lies in sectors like energy and industrial distribution rather than classic software. General Partner Ben Horowitz, nodding to the firm’s recent $15 billion fundraise (its largest ever), emphasized the necessity of American technological leadership: “At this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is fundamentally important for humanity that America wins … Our mission is ensuring 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 being the backbone of the economy, this sector has historically lagged in digital adoption. Emanate’s thesis holds that these businesses are leaving billions on the table due to reliance on manual processes. Because industrial distribution involves custom pricing, non-standard specifications, and complex processing services, every revenue-generating operation typically requires human intervention.
The consequences of these legacy workflows are severe: inbound demand via phone and email is often lost due to slow response times, and pricing decisions are frequently made on gut instinct rather than data.
In December 2025, Nirghin appeared at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco and argued that her generation, Gen Z, is AI native, viewing the technology as more of a language than a tool to be adopted. “We aren’t thinking about coding from scratch,” she said. “We’re thinking about coding with a coding agent side by side.” This is a fundamental change in “how you write, how you take tests, how you apply to jobs or different applications, because it’s not from the ground up … I think what that really means is that this broad level of use cases and applications we’re seeing is really being pioneered by the younger generation.”
Emanate’s solution is a network of autonomous AI agents designed to handle these operations end-to-end. Unlike previous waves of enterprise AI that focused on chatbots or simple automation, Emanate’s agents are capable of converting inbound demand 24/7 across multiple channels, nurturing existing customer relationships, and intelligently researching new prospects by scouring web and industry databases at speeds 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 entrants in the logistics space, such as HappyRobot, by focusing strictly on revenue generation. The company claims its product can increase customer revenue by 60%–80%.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com