Generative AI is hot among venture capital firms now, with $4.5 billion invested in 2022. Narrato, a AI content creation and collaboration platform, announced today it has joined the ranks of other generative AI startups with VC funding. Based in San Francisco, Narrato raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by AirTree Ventures, the Australian firm that was an early investor in Canva, Linktree and Employment Hero.

Other participants in the round included OfBusiness, a B2B e-commerce platform, and serial entrepreneur Shreesha Ramdas. Narrato is used by customers including payments SaaS startup ChargeBee, language learning app Preply and customer onboarding software Rocketlane. It will work with AirTree to expand across the United States.

Founded in January 2022 by Sophia Solanki, an Australian serial entrepreneur whose previous startup was content marketing and social media management SaaS platform DrumUp.

Narrato founder Sophia Solanki. Image Credits: Narrato

Solanki told TechCrunch that the Narrato team's first idea was to build the “GitHub for content,” with a workspace for marketing teams that offers automation, collaboration and publishing, among other features. But they had also been tracking generative AI over the past couple of years and “with its current state of maturity, it’s an extremely powerful tool for content creation.” The Narrato team decided to embed generative AI into different stages of the content process.

Narrato’s main feature is an AI content assistant that helps with planning, including automatic brief generation, content creation and optimization. It also has collaboration and workflow tools and automated publishing features. Solanki explained that for both AI and non-AI content creation, users choose from templates, including blogs, articles, web copy, emails, video scripts, social media content and art. Narrato also has a chat-like format for content creation through AI, and plans to expand its selection of generative AI-assisted content templates to hundreds.