The unicorn, now with $165 million in total funding, is putting AI content creation tools in the hands of enterprise users.
Four months after coming out of stealth, Typeface, a platform that helps companies use their own proprietary data and generative AI systems to create promotional content, announced that it has raised $100 million in a Series B round at a $1 billion valuation.
The funding round was led by Salesforce Ventures with existing investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures) and M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund) participating and brings the company’s total funding raised to $165 million. The investment comes shortly after Typeface announced partnerships with Google Cloud and Salesforce to make its AI features accessible to users in Google Docs, Google Drive and Gmail and in Salesforce’s marketing chatbot, Marketing GPT.
“We look at strategic partnerships as a way to reach the maximum number of customers in an aggressive timeline,” founder and CEO Abhay Parasnis told Forbes.
To use Typeface, companies feed their brand’s data, like fonts, product details and logo designs, into a licensed AI model of their choice: OpenAI’s GPT-4, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 2.0 or Google’s machine learning model Vertex AI, text generation model PaLM 2 or image creation model Imagen. The platform learns from these brand-specific images, and then customers can create personalized images or text such as various iterations of their product’s photos, blog posts, Google ads and LinkedIn job posts. Typeface did not disclose how many customers it has but said that its customer base ranges from small to large businesses across retail, hospitality and travel industries and are located across the world in countries including the U.S., Canada, UK and South Korea.
Since it publicly launched in February, Typeface has released Image Studio, a feature that lets users use textual prompts to create or edit product photos without needing a professional photoshoot or studio. Users can also use AI to convert existing video content like a conference recording or a keynote speech into an email or a blog post.
Parasnis says companies are using tools like Typeface to create a “content factory” to produce 10 times the amount of content they previously generated to share across social media. This kind of AI-generated personalized marketing content could be an effective and cheap way to target customers and test content strategies, says Mike Gualtieri, a principal analyst at Forrester who researches AI for global enterprises.
However, because Typeface’s tools are built on models like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion 2.0 and OpenAI’s GPT-4 that are trained on public data, they run the risk of creating content that could infringe copyrights or IP laws, says Gualtieri. Even though Typeface incorporates safety filters like plagiarism and authenticity checkers, the models may create content similar to an existing trademarked logo, he says.
“One of the good things about the widespread experimentation of these AI tools by consumers is that now… there’s some expectation that it’s not perfect. So brands can reduce their risk, especially if they tell customers that this was AI generated,” Gualtieri says.
That’s one of the reasons why content created through Typace’s platform contains metadata that labels the content as made by AI. For now, Parasnis says customers will be in control of their data and decide which AI models they want to work with. With the new funding, Typeface plans to scale its team and develop new products to automate other business functions like customer service.
“As exciting as generative AI is, it can’t be on its own island. It has to be integrated into existing business processes, existing cultures and organizations,” Parasnis says.
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