typeface.ai a startup developing an AI-powered dashboard for writing marketing copy and images, has emerged from stealth this week with $65 million in venture capital backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures), M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund) and Menlo Ventures.
Founded by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, Typeface attempts to combine generative AI with a brand's tone, audiences, and workflows to, as Parasnis quite ambitiously puts it, "reimagine" content workflows. and the development of corporate content.
“We provide a generative AI application that allows companies to develop personalized content,” Parasnis said. “CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, and VPs and Creative Directors are expressing a growing demand to combine generative AI platforms with hyper-tuned AI content to improve the future of content workflows.”
With Typeface, customers can type a command like “Write a funny blog post about apple juice” for the platform to execute, generating a multi-paragraph draft complete with images. The tone of the images and copy can be customized to target certain demographics or to align with a brand's style guidelines.
There is strong interest among companies in leveraging generative AI for advertising use cases.
In recent months, agencies contracted by Heinz, Nestlé, Martini & Rossi and Bacardi-owned Patrón have launched ad campaigns using images created by text-to-image systems such as DALL-E 2 and OpenAI's Midjourney. Last week, Coca-Cola signed an agreement with OpenAI to leverage the company's ChatGPT text script and DALL-E 2 to create personalized advertising copy, images and messages.
There is a growing industry, in fact, of generative AI startups focused on specific marketing and advertising applications. Startups like Movio, contentgrip.ai, copy.ai, Sellscale, Jasper, Omneky, and Regie.ai are using generative AI to create (apparently) better marketing copy, images, and even videos for ads, websites, and emails.
The acceptance has been rapid. according to a Statist report 87% of current AI users are already using, or considering using, AI to improve their email marketing. In other report projects that the generative AI market will be worth more than $110 billion by 2030.
But with increasing competition, beyond early winners like OpenAI, it's unclear which startups will come out on top in terms of market traction. Parasnis claims that Typeface has a fighting chance, mainly due to its platform's security and governance capabilities, as well as its ability to incorporate "brand-specific" visual assets.
Security is particularly 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 content filters. Meanwhile, the AI that generates images 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.
Typeface is not the only platform that does this. But it does have some traction: Parasnis says the company has clients in industries including marketing, advertising, sales, human resources and customer service. One client, Sequoia Benefits Group, uses Typeface to create text and images for marketing and human resources teams.
“As we go to market, we are excited to see strong interest and early commitment from a wide range of midsize and large companies,” Parasnis continued. “This level of customer response underscores the rapid growth of the market and highlights the appeal of our unique business vision of secure, micro-personalized content for teams.”
