Okara’s AI CMO is actively managing growth for 120,000+ businesses, processing 4 billion tokens a day across a multi-provider AI stack on Vercel, with eight sub-agents handling SEO, GEO, social, content, Reddit and Hacker News. The team of four ships to production six or seven times a day, and new AI models are available to users the same day they ship. Fatima Rizwan, Okara’s founder and CEO, said: "We're four people building for hundreds of thousands of companies. We can't afford to build infrastructure and not product. Vercel gives us the foundation to move as fast as we need to."
Okara is an AI CMO that directs a team of specialized sub-agents to drive marketing so founders do not have to. Given a website URL, the AI CMO builds a marketing strategy, develops a brand voice, and activates agents across SEO, content and social media, without a single marketing hire. Rizwan argues that distribution is stuck in the pre-AI era, fragmented across subscriptions and agencies that cost over $15,000 a month before a single dollar comes back.
Okara’s backend originally talked to eight model providers through separate SDKs, each with its own key management, image handling and edge cases. When the company expanded to open-source models the approach broke down, because every new model meant an engineer stopped shipping product to write an adapter, and retry logic, fallback routing and provider health monitoring were maintained by hand in Okara’s codebase. Vercel AI Gateway replaced every custom integration with a single configuration and moved retry and fallback handling into Vercel’s routing layer, including zero-data retention support for Okara’s privacy-sensitive secure chat. The day a new model ships, the team can make it available through Gateway with no adapter, no edge case testing and no deploy cycle.
Okara’s SEO agent can scan for problems and write the code that fixes them. When the agent finds a technical issue on a user’s site, it spins up a Vercel Sandbox and runs the analysis in an isolated environment. The findings are passed to a coding agent, which opens a pull request with the fix, ready for the developer to review and merge. Okara adopted Vercel Sandboxes the day they launched. The entire detection, analysis and code change loop runs automatically, with a human making the final call before anything goes live.
Okara is expanding its agent suite and moving upmarket to serve larger teams.