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A tech company allowing marketers and creatives to generate content briefs, ideas and images with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) has secured USD$1 million (AUD$1.4 million) in a pre-seed funding round led by AirTree Ventures.
Founded by Australian serial entrepreneur Sophia Solanki and based in San Francisco, California, Narrato’s raise also received backing from early-stage venture firm TheFund, the co-founders of business-to-business (B2B) commerce platform OfBusiness, and serial entrepreneur Shreesha Ramdas.
The raise comes six years after Solanki sold her previous AI content service-as-a-software (SaaS) startup DrumUp, which tracks content across social media channels and news organisations to help marketers uncover relevant trends.
DrumUp was co-founded alongside Vishal Dutta, who is also involved in Godot Media – a custom content writing service that Solanki has helped build for over a decade but has since pulled back from to focus on scaling Narrato.
Narrato's capital injection will be used to focus on product development and furthering the company’s footprint across the US.
“We want Narrato to be the AI-powered content workspace where companies can bring their entire marketing workflow and use AI seamlessly at the right moments,” said Solanki.
“Customers have often told us how difficult and expensive it is to scale their content processes, while ensuring both quality and efficiency.
“Although there are point solutions to create content through generative AI, there is a big opportunity to deeply embed this capability into existing marketing workflows.”
Founded in 2022, Narrato allows users to assign and track tasks, generate ideas, briefs and images using an AI assistant, create automatic search engine optimisation (SEO) content briefs for writers in seconds, and more.
The company’s clients include global payment software giant Chargebee, which is valued at $3.5 billion, as well as language learning app Preply, automated parking system ParkPlus, onboarding software firm Rocketlane, investment app Pearler, and more.
According to the company, Preply has already seen a jump of 40 per cent in its content production, while Rocketlane has seen a similar impact on its content creation process as the generative AI reduces the turnaround between creation to launching in the market.
Based on data from UK market research firm TechNavio, the global content marketing sector is estimated to grow by USD$584 billion (AUD$861 billion) between 2022 and 2027 – reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4 per cent.
However, Narrato noted a recent downturn in the market has caused companies to be more cost-conscious, adding pressure on marketers to create more content with limited resources.
“Having identified the massive opportunity for generative AI in content marketing and already successfully built two companies in this space, Sophia knows the market inside out,” AirTree partner Elicia McDonald said.
“She has a strong connection to the problem and has achieved impressive traction for a company at such an early stage, especially considering they’ve bootstrapped to date.
“At AirTree we love to be right by a founder's side, right from the start of their journey and we’re thrilled to be leading Narrato’s pre-seed round.”
The raise comes after more than 1,000 AI researchers and business leaders such as Elon Musk signed a letter calling for a pause on training ‘giant’ AI systems for at least six months, allowing time to study the danger of systems like GPT-4.
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