Nic Baird is Co-Founder and CEO at Koah, the native monetization platform for generative AI that embeds contextual advertising directly inside AI chat experiences. Baird is pioneering AI-native advertising infrastructure to help developers monetize high-intent conversations without compromising user experience.

Baird graduated from Yale University in 2019 with a double major in political science and history. After Yale, he served as a Varsity Sailing Coach at Stanford University. He was a member of South Park Commons starting in 2022, initially as a Community Builder and Investor before becoming a full member in 2023.

Baird won the 2019 Marlow Ropes College Sailor of the Year award, the nation's top individual honor in collegiate sailing. He was a four-time ICSA Coed All-America skipper at Yale. Reading Mario Gabriele's content inspired him to come to Silicon Valley and take the risk of starting a company.

Koah has raised over $26 million in total funding, including a $20.5 million Series A led by Theory Ventures in February 2026. The company is backed by Theory Ventures, Forerunner, and South Park Commons. Koah was founded in September 2024 and formally launched as a two-sided marketplace in early 2025.

Koah has scaled to over 2 million monthly active users engaging with conversational AI 3x per day and has served more than 35 million native ad impressions across 175 million queries. The platform delivers clickthrough rates of 7.5%, with early partners earning $10,000 in their first 30 days.