Font stylea startup developing an AI-powered dashboard for drafting marketing copy and images, to arise of stealth this week with $65 million in venture equity backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures), M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), and Menlo Ventures.
Founded by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, Typeface seeks to combine generative AI with a brand’s tone, audience, and workflows to — as Parasnis puts it rather ambitiously — reinvent content workflows and enterprise content development.
“We provide a generative AI application that enables companies to develop personalized content,” said Parasnis. “CEOs, CMOs, heads of digital, and VPs and directors of creative are all demonstrating a growing demand for combining generative AI platforms with hyper-refined AI content to improve the future of content workflows.”
Using Typeface, customers can type in a command like “Write a nice blog post about apple juice” to have the platform execute it by writing a multi-paragraph concept piece complete with images. The tone of all images and text can be adjusted to target certain demographics or to match a brand’s style guidelines.
Certainly, there is a strong desire among the enterprise to use generative AI for advertising use cases.
In recent months, agencies contracted by Heinz, Nestlé, Martini & Rossi, owned by Bacardi and Patrón, have launched ad campaigns using imagery created by text-to-image systems such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. Last week, Coca-Cola signed a deal with OpenAI to leverage the company’s copywriting ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to create ad copy, images, and personalized messages.
Image Credits: Font style
There is even a growing industry of generative AI startups focusing on marketing and advertising-specific applications. Startups like Movie, CopierCopy.ai, Sellscale, Jasper, Omneky, and Regie.ai use generative AI to (ostensibly) create better marketing copy, images, and even videos for ads, websites, and emails.
The recording went fast. Statistical reports that 87% of current AI users already use or are considering using AI to improve their email marketing. Another report projects that the generative AI market will be worth more than $110 billion by 2030.
But with the increasing competition, apart from early winners like OpenAI, it’s not clear which startups will rise above the rest in terms of market traction. Parasnis argues that Typeface has a good shot, primarily due to the platform’s security and manageability capabilities and ability to include “brand-specific” visual assets.
Especially when it comes to generative AI, security is important from a brand perspective. Even today’s best text-generating AI has been shown to fabricate facts and spout toxic content, content filters, or no. Image-generating AI, meanwhile, has come under scrutiny for copying elements of the art and photos into its training data without necessarily attributing them. Getty Images, among others, has sued prominent creators of generative AI imaging systems for allegedly infringing their intellectual property.
Font isn’t the only platform to do this. But it do have some traction — Parasnis says the company has clients in industries such as marketing, advertising, sales, HR and customer support. One client, Sequoia Benefits Group, uses Typeface to create text and graphics for marketing and HR teams.
“As we emerge from stealth, we are excited to see strong early interest and engagement from a broad range of mid-sized companies,” continued Parasnis. “This level of customer response underscores the rapid market growth and highlights the appeal of our unique enterprise vision of micro-personalised, secure content for teams.”
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.