Nirghin, a Thiel partner as well as the youngest member of the board of Google The Impact Fund, won support for Emanate from Peter Thiel himself, as well as Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and other famous angels. San Francisco-based Emanate was founded in 2025 and is currently staffed by a small, tight-knit team of less than 10 AI engineers and product designers. Billing itself as the first AI revenue engine built for industrial materials companies, it plans to grow its revenue nearly 50-fold in the coming months as it deepens design partnerships with leading industry distributors.

Emanate’s debut is part of a16z’s “American Dynamism“The investment thesis is mainly in companies that support the national interest, such as logistics, industrial, and critical infrastructure.

Nirghin, who is also a Stanford AI researcher and former Google Science Fair Grand Prize winner, said he wants Emanate’s impact to extend beyond California. “So far, most of the benefits of AI have gone to Silicon Valley. We’re bringing them to the industries that build America,” Nirghin said.

For a16z, the investment underscores a belief that the “biggest remaining AI upside” is in sectors like energy distribution and industry rather than classic software. General partner Ben Horowitz, nods to the new company $15 billion in fundraising (this is the largest ever), emphasized the need for American technological leadership: “In this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is vital for humanity that America wins… Our mission is to ensure that America wins the next 100 years of technology.”

Revolutionizing America’s backbone

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 behind in digital adoption. Emanate’s thesis states that these businesses are leaving billions on the table by relying on manual processes. Because the distribution industry involves custom pricing, nonstandard specifications, and complex processing services, every revenue-generating operation typically requires human intervention.

The consequences of these legacy workflows are dire: Inbound demand via phone and email is often lost due to slow response times, and pricing decisions are often made on gut instinct rather than data.

In December 2025, Nirghin appeared in Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco and argues that his generation, Gen Z, is native AI, seeing technology as more of a language than a tool to be used. “We didn’t think about coding from scratch,” he said. “We are thinking about coding a coding agent together.” It’s a fundamental change in “how you write, how you take tests, how you apply for jobs or different applications, because it’s not from the beginning… I think what it really means is that this wide level of use cases and applications that we see are really 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 AI business waves that focused on chatbots or simple automation, Emanate’s agents are able to convert inbound demand 24/7 across multiple channels, nurture existing customer relationships, and intelligently research new prospects by scouring web and industry databases at the speed of human teams.

“These companies deserve the same AI superpowers that tech companies are taking 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 that its product can increase the customer’s income by 60% to 80%.