Typeface lands $100M for its generative AI content creation engine

AI

Generative artificial intelligence has given birth to another unicorn.

Typeface Inc., a platform that automates enterprise content creation, today announced a $100 million Series B investment round led by a blue-chip cast of venture capitalists. The oversubscribed round brings the total amount the San Francisco-based startup has raised to $165 million at a valuation of $1 billion.

Typeface, which came out of stealth mode just four months ago and is still waitlisting prospective customers, said it intends to use the financing to invest in sales and product development. The company’s generative AI product is aimed at marketing, sales, human resources and customer service professionals who need to generate custom content ranging from social media posts to long-form video scripts.

The company says it has the capability to rapidly personalize content at scale in a voice that adapts to the style of the business and individuals in it. In just four months it has closed partnership deals with Salesforce Inc. and Google Cloud, both of whose venture arms participated in the funding.

“It’s the right time to double down and capitalize on the opportunity that lies ahead,” said head of product Vishal Sood, referring to the size of the funding for a small startup.

Beyond text

Founded by Abhay Parasnis, formerly chief technology officer at Adobe Systems Inc., Typeface is building a multimodal generative engine that can create and modify text and images from natural language commands.

It doesn’t stop at text, however. Earlier this month it introduced Generative Edit for Images, a feature that allows users to modify images using natural language commands.

It also introduced Text Blend, which can produce a text transcript from a video URL in seconds and turn the output into such content as a recap blog post, follow-up email and summary for employee training. “You just give us a few examples of how you speak and we can do it in seconds,” Sood said.

Typeface has built a set of templates and workflows specific to different functions in a business for creating content such as job postings, social media posts and email messages. The company is particularly keen on the enterprise market where customizing messages to different audiences and regions is complex and time-consuming.

“A lot of Fortune 500s are in 90 different markets and going to all of them is a lot of work,” Sood said. “With tools like Typeface, they can do personalization at scale.”

The machine learning model can be trained to adapt to different languages and cultural nuances. “It understands the language and the dialect in that language,” he said. “It semantically understands the meaning of what you’re writing and re-writes in another language versus translating word for word.”

Typeface’s generative AI engine isn’t limited to just short-form content, Sood said. “We have built workflows to handle really long content,” he said. “We’re probably not at the stage where we can write a 200-page book, but we can produce long videos just fine.”

Funding was led by Salesforce Ventures LLC with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group LLC, GV Management Co LLC, Menlo Ventures Management L.P. and Microsoft Corp.’s M12 venture fund.

Image: Typeface