Dan Moore started programming at age eight. After later graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in computer science, he realized he didn’t want to work for a larger company.
“I realized that enterprise life wasn’t for me, just being a small wheel on a giant machine,” Moore said.
Moore went on to found multiple startups, including Awaiting, a virtual waitlist app for brick-and-mortar retailers. Moore said that through this experience, he got into product management and go-to-market sales work.
“[I] found this market need, which is a pretty obvious market need, that people taking new products to market need to go get connected to their target audience and tell people about it through marketing, but also through sales and discovery,” Moore said.
This market need, combined with the boom of AI Agents over the past few years, led Moore to create Tarka in 2024. Co-founded by Moore, Justin Michela, and AJ Gleser, the startup is an AI Agent platform built to help go-to-market teams “accelerate their customer discovery, market research, and growth.”
A go-to-market team can start as no more than a single founder who has an idea for a product. And as Moore noted, the process of bringing that idea to market involves a lot of marketing, growth activities, and customer discovery. He added that this can be a time-consuming process for either an individual or a team aiming to promote a product.
“It just takes a lot of busy work and stuff that people hate to do,” Moore said. “And so Tarka simplifies all that.”
Tarka’s place in a crowded space
Moore said there is a lot of competition in the go-to-market space. He said that specifically across outbound-led sales (Tarka’s target niche), founder-led sales, and product managers, there is some $250 million in annual spending in the United States. Accordingly, the startup is looking to differentiate itself from its competitors.
“There’s no one really taking the specific approach that we’re taking to it,” Moore said.
Tarka’s first AI Agent, which is currently in development, is a networking tool for LinkedIn. The agent will be able to impersonate a user’s LinkedIn profile and automatically find potential customers, contact and speak with them, and achieve an intended outcome (such as setting up a phone call).
Unlike some other models, which use email spam to reach as many people as possible, Tarka’s AI Agent is intended to maintain a person’s personal brand by speaking naturally with potential connections within the Linkedin platform.
During the setup phase, the user can customize their agent by providing details about their product, their brand, and how they want the agent to interact. Thereafter, the Tarka agent uses LinkedIn just like a human would. It researches and finds individuals who would be interested in the product and suggests to the user to reach out to them. The user can then individually accept the agent’s suggestions or allow the agent to reach out automatically.
“It’s just like sitting down a human in front of a computer and having them click around the browser, and having that full fledged experience, except it can do it a lot more efficiently and faster,” Moore said.
When customizing their AI Agent, users have multiple intended outcome options to choose from. These include getting potential customers on a customer interview or demo call, or collecting product feedback from potential users.
Moore said that the startup faces some challenges with their approach, as LinkedIn makes money from ad revenue and wants real people to be on their platform, not artificial intelligence models.
“I would say that LinkedIn is an adversarial environment,” Moore said. “They explicitly do not want people automating things.”
QUICK BITS
Startup: Tarka
Co-Founders: Dan Moore, Justin Michela, AJ Gleser
Founded: 2024
Team size: 3
Location: Raleigh
Website: www.tarka.ai
Funding: Raising seed
Right now, Tarka is planning to offer AI Agents by subscription. In the future, the startup plans to transition to a more outcome-driven model, in which customers will pay more or less depending on how much they are getting out of the product.
Additionally, the startup is looking toward the future for more applications of their AI Agents.
“What we’ve built can use LinkedIn really well, but that’s just one website,” Moore said. “[There are] hundreds of other websites and hundreds of other things that you can do with AI that [people] don’t want to do.”
Tarka already has a waitlist of more than 200 customers and is currently working on improving their agent and determining the best pricing for their product.
“We’re constantly pumping out new features with our paid pilot customers,” Moore said.
From just those twelve pilot customers, the startup is bringing in over $100,000 in annual revenue. Moore said they hope to reach $1 million in revenue by the end of this year.
