font, a startup developing an AI-powered dashboard for writing marketing copy and graphics, announced this week with $65 million in venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures), M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), and Menlo Ventures joined from camouflage.
Founded by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, Typeface seeks to combine generative AI with a brand’s tone, audience and workflows to, as Parasnis quite ambitiously puts it, “reinvent” content workflows and enterprise content development.
“We provide a generative AI application that enables companies to develop personalized content,” said Parasnis. “CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, VPs and creative directors point to a growing demand to combine generative AI platforms with hyper-optimized AI content to improve the future of content workflows.”
With Typeface, customers can write an assignment like “Write a nice post about apple juice” that the platform can execute and write a draft with multiple paragraphs and images. The tone of images and text can be adjusted to suit specific demographics or to match a brand’s style guidelines.
There is certainly a strong desire among companies to use generative AI for advertising use cases.
In recent months, agencies contracted by Heinz, Nestlé, Martini & Rossi and Bacardi’s Patrón have launched advertising campaigns using images generated with text-to-image systems such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. Last week, Coca-Cola signed an agreement with OpenAI to use the company’s ChatGPT text script and DALL-E 2 to create custom text, graphics, and promotional messages.
photo credit: typography
There is even a growing industry of generative AI startups focused on specific marketing and advertising applications. Startups like Movio, copyistCopy.ai, Sellscale, Jasper, Omneky, and Regie.ai use generative AI to (seemingly) create better marketing copy, images, and even videos for ads, websites, and emails.
Acceptance was fast. Statist reports that 87% of current AI users already use AI or are considering using AI to improve their email marketing. Another report estimates that the generative AI market will be worth more than $110 billion by 2030.
But as competition heats up, alongside early winners like OpenAI, it’s unclear which startups will come out on top in terms of market traction. Parasnis says Typeface stands a good chance, largely because of the platform’s security and management capabilities, as well as its ability to integrate “branded” visual assets.
Security is especially important from a brand perspective when it comes to generative AI. Even today’s best text-generating AI has been shown to make up facts and spew out toxic content, with or without a content filter. Meanwhile, the AI that generates images is under scrutiny for copying elements of art and photos into its training data without necessarily combining them. Getty Images has sued leading developers of AI imaging systems, among others, for allegedly infringing their intellectual property.
Font isn’t the only platform to do this. But it does have a certain appeal: According to Parasnis, the company has customers in industries such as marketing, advertising, sales, human resources and customer service. One customer, Sequoia Benefits Group, uses Typeface to create text and graphics for their marketing and HR teams.
“Coming out of camouflage, we are pleased with the strong initial interest and commitment from a wide range of medium and large companies,” continued Parasnis. “This level of customer response underscores the rapid growth of the market and underscores the appeal of our unique business vision of secure, micro-personalized content for teams.”
Source: La Neta Neta
Jason Jack is an experienced technology journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in computer science and engineering, he has a deep understanding of the latest technology trends and developments. He writes about a wide range of technology topics, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, software development, and cybersecurity.
