How Okara Runs AI CMO Agents for 120,000 Companies
A four-person startup is quietly running marketing for over 120,000 companies. Okara has built an AI CMO that directs eight specialized sub-agents across SEO, content, social media, Reddit, and Hacker News, all on Vercel.
The platform processes 4 billion tokens every day. Founders simply hand over their website URL, and Okara’s AI CMO agents build a full marketing strategy, develop a brand voice, and activate across channels, with no marketing hire needed.
Okara’s founder, Fatima Rizwan, built the company around a simple frustration. “You can build something in a weekend and spend months trying to get anyone to notice,” she said. Distribution, in her view, was stuck in the pre-AI era, fragmented across tools and agencies that charged over $15,000 a month before a single dollar returned.
To serve hundreds of thousands of clients with a team of four, infrastructure had to be invisible. That’s where Vercel came in. Originally, Okara’s backend connected to eight AI model providers through separate SDKs, each with its own keys, dashboards, and billing. Adding open-source models broke the system entirely. Every new model pulled an engineer away from the product to write a custom adapter instead.
The team moved to Vercel AI Gateway, replacing every custom integration with a single configuration. Retry logic and fallback routing shifted from Okara’s codebase into Vercel’s routing layer entirely. Now, when a new model ships, the team can make it available to users on the same day, with no adapter and no extra deploy cycle.
For agent workflows, Okara adopted Vercel Sandboxes from day one. When the SEO agent identifies a technical issue on a client’s site, it spins up an isolated sandbox, runs the analysis, and passes the findings to a coding agent. That agent then opens a pull request with the fix ready to review. Detection, analysis, and code change all run automatically, with a human making the final call before anything goes live.
Today, Okara ships to production six or seven times a day. Every improvement reaches customers the same day it lands. A solo founder using the platform gets the same distribution capability as a team ten times their size, without the headcount or the five-figure monthly agency bill. Okara is now expanding its AI CMO agent suite and moving upmarket to serve larger teams.
