While working at Vetan, a startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) manage employee payroll, Jatin Mehta realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic sales. The cost of hiring an agency exceeds your budget and generating content is expensive, both in time and money.
“Having a strong online presence is critical for e-commerce stores like Shopify and Woo, as online traffic is the bread and butter of their business,” Mehta told TechCrunch in an email interview. “But existing content marketing solutions are not comprehensive and require search engine optimization (SEO) expertise. Companies need multiple SEO tools and hire content strategists, writers and agencies to outsource their content marketing work “.
Thus, along with Ranti Dev Sharma and Ayush Jasuja, he co-founded Mehta SpeedyBrand, which aims to deliver affordable and “high-quality” SEO content to SMBs using generative AI. SpeedyBrand announced today that it raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by GV (Google’s venture arm) and Y Combinator that values the company at $15 million post-money.
Powered by generative AI, SpeedyBrand’s platform can create custom SEO-optimized content, including websites and social media posts, for brands. Brands first choose a theme. They then have the platform generate text and suggest images that might be appropriate for the type of content they’re generating.
From the SpeedyBrand control panel, the generated content can be further edited and customized before being published on various channels. An analytics component allows brands to track how content is performing once it’s live.
Image Credits: SpeedyBrand
“The economic slowdown calls for cost-effective marketing solutions,” Mehta said. “Speedy is well positioned to help businesses with an affordable solution.”
But there are reasons to be wary of the technology.
For one thing, generative AI, no matter how good it is, can—and does—run wild. Thanks to a phenomenon known as “hallucination,” AI models sometimes confidently make up facts. And, as a result of biases and other imbalances in its training data, text-generating AI can emit toxic and highly offensive comments.
In another potential problem for brands, generative AI has been shown to plagiarize copyrighted works. one to study found that an indirect predecessor of ChatGPT, GPT-2, can be asked to “copy and paste” entire paragraphs from its training data.
Then there’s the matter of generative AI spamming the internet. As James Vincent of The Verge wrote in a recent piece, generative AI models are changing the economics of the web, making it cheaper and easier to generate lower-quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools to investigate news sources, has it exposed hundreds of sites advertising with generic names that include misinformation created with generative AI.
Mehta claims that SpeedyBrand is not a content factory, and that it takes steps to mitigate any toxic content that may be generated by the platform’s AI. According to him, SpeedyBrand’s AI can be customized to brand tone and generates provably “plagiarism-free” content, incorporating feedback from content edits to improve future production.
How true is all this? It’s hard to say without a third-party audit. But brands, no doubt eager to jump on the generative AI bandwagon, seem to be embracing SpeedyBrand.
The company, which has a team of six people, has about 50 paying customers and more than 1,000 users. Annual recurring revenue is $100,000, and Mehta predicts it will reach $1 million next year.
That’s impressive considering the competition. SpeedyBrand is going up against Typeface, which recently emerged from stealth with $65 million in venture capital. Startups like Movio, copyistCopy.ai, Sellscale, Jasper, Omneky, and Regie.ai are also using generative AI to (apparently) create better marketing copy, images, and even videos for ads, websites, and emails.
It is a large and growing market. Statistics reports that 87% of current AI users are already using, or 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.
Given that almost half of SMB owners who handle content marketing themselves, there is an even stronger incentive within this cohort to adopt tools that could, at least on the surface, save time, money and a huge headache.
“Speedy saves hours of marketing marketing from a company’s workforce, from strategy to content generation and then publishing,” said Mehta. “Speedy gives them and their team hours every day so they can focus on the core of their business.”
With the proceeds from the funding round, SpeedyBrand plans to roll out additional tools for text and image generation.
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