His startup Typeface, which he launched in June 2022, has raised $65 million in Series A financing to continue building out its generative AI platform for marketing and communication content such as blog posts, Instagram posts, websites and job postings on LinkedIn.
Parasnis claims this will solve the problem of a lack of people with marketing skills.
He told Forbes: “The world where I come from, you need to master Photoshop for a decade before you can really use it to produce amazing content.”
His startup lets companies upload their existing content such as web pages, blogs, Instagram posts, brand logos and other visual assets. This personalised data set, combined with public data, is used to train Typeface’s model, which is built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and a customised version of Stable Diffusion 2.0. The platform is designed to learn based on the company-specific data and create text and image content that is personalised to each enterprise’s brand voice and audience.
The project is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, M12 and Menlo Ventures.
One of Typeface’s early customers is Sequoia Benefits Group, which uses the platform to create thousands of job descriptions and five versions of its website, each tailored to a different audience. The startup declined to disclose how many customers it has.
The technology has its limits. It can't do video content and 80 per cent of businesses use video for marketing. It is also built on datasets from Stable Diffusion and OpenAI that contain data that is at risk of copyright infringement. Stability AI was sued by Getty Images for copyright infringement. This might create some reluctance for customer adoption.
There is another issue in that the content will be based on databases created by marketing departments and managers. This will mean that future webpages and blogs will be written using incoherent babble, and over used SEO words because the AI believes that it is good. To make matters worse the people who are assigned to checking it will believe it is good because they talk like that anyway. The result is that no one will actually read any internet connect produced by AI while managers continue to fling money at it and get rid of those with writing skills.
Typeface uses Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI infrastructure, which lets the user set up content moderation controls, data governance and safety checks, a procedure that Typeface conducts for each company separately.
