As the enthusiasm for AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, a startup developing what it calls an “AI content” platform, has raised $125 million at a valuation of $1.7 billion. Remarkably, the tranche is the company’s first and comes as Jasper is in the process of acquiring AI startup Overwritea grammar and style checker with over a million users worldwide.
CEO Dave Rogenmoser tells ukbusinessupdates.com that the funding will be spent building out Jasper’s core products, improving the customer experience and bringing Jasper’s technology to more apps. Led by Insight Partners with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, Foundation Capital, Founders Circle Capital, Coatue and HubSpot Ventures, it will also support Jasper’s ongoing efforts to fold the Outwrite brand under its own name, he said, and unite the two companies. ‘offer in 2023.
“To build a leading company in generative AI, we need the right infrastructure – that’s what we will raise [new] capital,” Rogenmoser told ukbusinessupdates.com in an email interview. “We want to build a world-class company, [and] for that we need capital and very strategic partners.”
Rogenmoser launched Jasper early last year with JP Morgan and Chris Hull, who largely started the company together. Rogenmoser is an alum of Y Combinator and co-founded Proof, a startup that used algorithms to customize companies’ websites. Morgan and Hull, who have backgrounds in business-to-business marketing and process automation, also helped co-launch Proof, whose technology laid the foundation for Jasper.
“A marketer by trade, I have long been interested in AI and watched it become more tangible and accessible – from theory and academia to a transformative, applied technology that could help people,” said Rogenmoser. “With the arrival of [OpenAI’s] GPT-3, we saw an opportunity to launch an AI content platform that could help businesses and professional creators brainstorm and get their jobs done faster and more efficiently.”
Image Credits: Jasper
Jasper uses AI to generate content for blog articles, social media posts, website copies, and more. Using the platform, customers can describe in natural language what they want Jasper to write, whether it’s a keyword-heavy article designed to rank well in search engines or existing content with added context.
Many startups do this too – Copy.ai, WriteSonic, Peppertype, Wordune, and Simplified to name a few. ukbusinessupdates.com even recently wrote a study on the market for AI-powered, copy-generating adtech vendors, which is robust. text blacksmith last April received $10 million in funding for its AI-powered content generation platform, while Copy.ai closed a $10 million round in October.
Rogenmoser claims that Jasper’s language models – trained on 10% of the internet and tuned for ‘customer specificity’ – set it apart. Among other things, they support Jasper’s browser extension for Chrome that provides contextual content recommendations across platforms, including Google Docs, Gmail, Notion, and Hubspot.
“The people who will win in generative AI will be the ones with the best feedback loops,” he said. “We are committed to building the best feedback to AI loop.”
Jasper’s other differentiator, says Rogenmoser, is Jasper Art, a recently launched AI art-generating system. As with systems such as DALL-E 2, Jasper Art converts prompts into images, allowing users to adjust aspects such as the medium (eg, “Canvas”, “Pastel”), art style (“Van Gogh”), and mood.
Image Credits: Jasper
While there are a number of free and paid alternatives to Jasper Art (see Stable Diffusion, Pixelz.ai, and Midjourney, to name a few), Rogenmoser calls it an art-generating system designed specifically for marketing applications, such as creating of copyright-free stock photos. He says an early adopter, Mongoose Media, uses Jasper Art to generate lies flat and backgrounds “to scale” around product images for its designers.
Of course, like other AI text-to-image systems, Jasper Art has limitations. An FAQ on the product page states that the system, which has a content filter to attempt to detect “sensitive” or “unsafe” images, such as images involving violence, may contain biases that lead to the generation of images that reinforce negative stereotypes ( like CEOs who are mostly white and male).
Also, under the terms of Jasper Art’s license, customers do not have the exclusive right to use generated images. The generations of the system are free for anyone to reuse and remix – perhaps Jasper’s attempt to mitigate 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, leading image hosts like Getty Images to forbid Artificial intelligence generated art for fear of legal battle.
Rogenmoser acknowledged that there is “a lot to learn” about the boundaries around AI content generation tools and what regulation might look like in the future.
“The biggest challenge facing the AI generation industry is around data ethics and consumer adoption,” he said. “While we are in constant awe of the power of our technology, we are deeply aware of the responsibility that imposes on us. We are determined to remain responsible for the power of technology, but we also recognize that our control is limited.”
Image Credits: Jasper
The controversies have not deterred marketers eager to embrace AI technologies for text and image generation. According to a 2021 questionnaire according to Phrasee, 63% of marketers would consider investing in AI to generate and optimize ad copy. It’s an admittedly biased finding: Phrasee sells AI-powered copy generation software. But vendor-neutral analytics company Statista reports that 87% of current AI users are already using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and improving their email marketing.
According to Rogenmoser, Jasper has more than 70,000 customers and generated revenue of $40 million last year. The company expects to end 2022 with more than double that revenue — $90 million — buoyed by the buzz around AI for adtech and martech.
“We are a hyper-growth company that also focuses on profitability,” said Rogenmoser. “The pandemic has accelerated this business. While organizations are looking for ways to find efficiencies within teams, AI generation is the natural choice to empower creators and teams.”
Jeff Horing of Insight Partners added in an emailed statement: “It’s not often you see a shift as important as generative AI, and Jasper is positioned to be a platform to change the way companies develop content and convey ideas. , to transform. The company has built a huge community around AI in such a short time and we see new use cases being shared every day, including across the enterprise. We look forward to working with the Jasper team as they continue to grow and expand their vision.”
