[ad_1]
As interest around AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, which develops a platform it describes as “AI content,” has raised $125 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. The tract follows the company’s first, impressively up-and-coming Jasper AI startup Outwrite, a grammar and writing tool that has gained more than a million users worldwide.
CEO Dave Rogenmoser said the funding for TechCruch will help build Jasper’s core products, improve the customer experience and bring Jasper technology into more applications. Led by Insight Partners with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, Foundation Capital, Founders Circle Capital, Coatue and HubSpot Ventures, Jasper said it supports Outwrite’s continued efforts to fold the brand under its own roof and unify the two companies. Deliveries in 2023.
We need the right infrastructure to build a market-leading company in generative AI – that’s what we’re building. [new] Capital B,” Rogenmoser told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We want to build a world-class business, [and] To do this we need capital and top strategic partners.
Rogenmoser started Jasper early last year with JP Morgan and Chris Hall, who together launched the company in a big way. Rogenmoser is a Y Combinator alum with a proven startup that used algorithms to optimize business websites. Morgan and Hull — who have backgrounds in business-to-business marketing and process automation — also helped co-launch the certification that laid the foundation for Jasper’s technology.
“I’m a businessman by trade and I’ve been interested in AI for a long time and I’ve seen how it’s becoming more tangible and accessible — from theory and academia to dynamic, practical technology that can help people,” Rogenmoser said. “In coming [OpenAI’s] At GPT-3, we saw an opportunity to open an AI content platform that helps businesses and professional creators think and do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
Image Credits: Jasper
Jasper uses AI to generate content for blog articles, social media posts, website copy, and more. Using the platform, clients can specify in natural language what they want Jasper to write, whether it’s a keyword-rich piece designed to rank well in search engines, or repurposing existing content with added context.
Many startups do this too – Copy.ai, WriteSonic, Peppertype, Wordtune and Simple to name a few. In fact, TechCrunch recently wrote a market study of AI-powered, copy-generating adtech vendors , which is solid. Copysmith raised $10 million for its AI-powered content generation platform last April, and Copy.ai closed a $10 million round in October.
Rogenmoser says Jasper’s language models – trained on 10% of the web and tuned to “customer specifications” – identify. They power the Jasper browser extension for Chrome, which provides contextual content recommendations across platforms including Google Docs, Gmail, Notion, and Hubspot, among other apps and services.
“The people who win at generative AI will be the ones with the best feedback,” he said. “We are committed to building the best feedback for the AI loop.”
Another difference to Jasper, Rogenmoser says, is JasperArt, a recently launched AI art-generating system. In systems such as DALL-E 2, Jasper Art converts requests into images, allowing users to adjust settings such as medium (eg, “canvas,” “pastel”), art style (“van Gogh”), and mood.
Image Credits: Jasper
While there are many free and paid alternatives to Jasper Art (see Stable Diffusion, Pixelz.ai, and Midjourney to name a few), Rogenmoser positions it as an art generation method designed for commercial applications, such as creating copyright-free stock photos. . One early adopter, Mongoose Media, says it’s using JasperArt for its designers to create flat lines and backgrounds around product images.
Of course, like other AI text-to-image systems, Jasper Art has limitations. According to an FAQ on the product page, the system has a content filter that tries to find images that are “difficult” or “unsafe” and may contain biases that cause it to generate images that reinforce negative stereotypes (such as CEOs who are predominantly white and male).
According to Jasper Art’s license terms, customers also do not have exclusive rights to use created images. Generations of the system are free for anyone to re-purpose and re-mix – perhaps an attempt by Jasper to reduce future intellectual property and fair use challenges. Systems like Jasper are often trained on billions of images from the web, some of which are copyrighted, with image hosts such as Getty Images refusing to ban AI-generated art for fear of legal battles.
Rogenmoser admits there is “a lot to learn” about the boundaries around AI content generation tools and what the future will look like.
“The main challenge facing the AI generation industry is around ethics in terms of data and consumer acceptance,” he said. “While we continue to appreciate the power of our technology, we are acutely aware of the responsibility it places on us. We are committed to being accountable for the power of technology, but we also recognize that our control is limited.”
Image Credits: Jasper
The controversies haven’t deterred marketers who seem to want to use AI technologies for text and image generation. In the year According to a 2021 survey by Phrase, 63% of marketers will consider investing in AI to generate and improve ad copy. It’s a discovery of accepted bias – Phrase sells AI-powered copy-generating software. But vendor-independent analytics firm Statista reports that 87% of current AI adopters are using or considering using AI to improve sales forecasting and email marketing.
According to Rogenmoser, Jasper has more than 70,000 customers and generated $40 million in revenue last year. The company will end 2022 with more than double that revenue — $90 million — fueled by buzz around AI in adtech and martech.
“We are a hypergrowth company focused on profitability,” said Rogenmoser. “The pandemic has accelerated this business. As organizations look for ways to achieve efficiency within teams, AI is a natural choice to augment generational innovators and teams.
Insight Partners’ Jeff Horing added in an emailed statement: “It’s not often that change is seen as useful as generative AI, and Jasper is positioned to be a platform to transform the way businesses develop content and communicate ideas.” The company has built a large community around AI in a short period of time, and we see new use cases every day, including in the enterprise. We look forward to partnering with the Jasper team as they continue to grow and expand their vision.
[ad_2]
Source link