Regie.ai, a startup using OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generation system to create sales and marketing content for brands, today received Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners from foundation capital South Park Commons, Day One Ventures and prominent angel investors. The hot investment comes as VCs see a growing opportunity in AI-powered, adtech companies generating adtech copy, where their technology can be time-saving and personalizable.
Reggie in 2010 Founded in 2020 by Matt Millen and Srinath Sridhar. Previously a software engineer at Google and Meta, Sridhar is a data scientist by trade, working on enterprise-grade AI systems that find duplicate images and rank search results. Millen was previously VP at T-Mobile, leading national sales teams (eg, strategic accounts and public sector).
With Riji, he and Millen aim to create ways for companies to communicate with their customers through channels such as email, social media, text, podcasts, online advertising and more, Sridhar said. As companies have multiple platforms and media to communicate with their customers, content marketers can find it challenging to consistently generate compelling content to reach their customers.
“The way content is generated has fundamentally changed,” Sridhar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The marketers and copywriters who work in the enterprise…are on the rise. [need] To produce and manage content and content workflows at scale.
Reggie uses GPT-3 to power his service – the same GPT-3 that can generate poems, proposals, and academic papers. But it’s a “taste” of GPT-3 on a training dataset of about 20,000 sales sequences (to convert sequence steps into paying customers) and about 100 million sales emails. Also in the mix are custom language systems developed by Reggie. Designed to integrate with existing sales platforms like Outreach, HubSpot and SalesLoft to reflect brands and their messaging.
Image Credits: lead
So that the systems don’t spit out problematic languages, Reggie says every system. It undergoes “humane treatment” and screening before release. The startup says it trains its systems in “inclusive” language and tests them for bias toward certain demographic groups.
Clients can use Reg to create original, search-engine-optimized content or create custom sales sequences. The platform offers blog and social media post-authoring tools for personalizing messages, as well as a Chrome extension that analyzes the “quality” of emails customers send and optionally offers text.
“Generative AI is completely disrupting the way content is created today. Regi’s biggest competitors will be the big content authoring and curation platforms where AI will be the first to shape the future,” Sridhar said confidently. “Adobe’s suite of products, including Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, and now FIMA and Adobe Experience Cloud, continues to build on Reggie’s intelligent content creation and management platform for the enterprise.”
More immediately, Reggie competes with vendors like Jasper, Phrase, CopySmith and Copy.ai – all of which tap AI to create spoken marketing copy. But Sridhar Reggie argues that it’s a more vertical platform that integrates text, images and workflows into a single pane of glass for go-to-market teams in an enterprise.
“Generative AI is such a paradigm shift that not only productivity and companies’ top lines but also their bottom lines go down at the same time. There are very few products that can improve both of that financial equation.” Sridhar continued. “So if a company wants to consolidate sales tools or reduce costs by reducing outsourcing, Reggie can do so while simultaneously increasing revenue. If you’re an outbound marketing agency looking to retain more clients and generate content more efficiently, Reggie can definitely do it for agencies too.
The company currently has more than 70 software-as-a-service customers on annual contracts, including AT&T, Sophos, Okta and Crunchbase. Sridhar did not disclose revenue, but said he expects the 25-person company to grow “significantly” this year.
“This is a revolutionary new field. And as usual, adoption requires educating users. Sridhar said. “It is clear to our experts that the world has changed. But it will take time for others to get their hands dirty and convince themselves that this is happening – and this is a very positive development. So we have to be patient in educating the industry. We also need to demonstrate that content quality does not suffer and can be better and further sustained by the strategic application of AI.
To date, Reggie has raised $14.8 million.
