AI Text and Image Generator Startup Jasper Raises $125M

Generative content startup Jasper has raised $125 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Jasper’s platform uses AI to generate written content based on initial prompts and recently expanded into the text-to-image space with Jasper Art. The funding makes Jasper a unicorn with a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Jasper AI

Jasper’s generative AI is designed for producing any kind of content based on limited suggestions. The company aims mainly at businesses in need of a variety of content that can be adjusted and repackaged for different outlets. The AI can produce social media posts, website content, long-form articles, and other writings. Jasper’s AI has a basic training level from the web that can then be fine-tuned depending on the customer. Jasper’s AI has also been used at the consumer level for handling everything from writing emails to producing illustrations for children’s books. The company recently released a Google Chrome extension so that users can access Jasper whenever they are online and get ideas that match the context of their open tabs.

‍“Generative AI represents a major breakthrough in creative potential, but it’s still inaccessible and intimidating to many,” Jasper CEODave Rogenmoser said. “Jasper is working to bring AI to the masses and teach people how to leverage it responsibly so that businesses and individuals can better convey their ideas. We’re grateful to our investors for believing in that potential as firmly as we do.”

AI Writing Up

AI-assisted writing and text-to-image are appearing everywhere. Image-generating AI became much more available recently with Microsoft embedding OpenAI’s DALL-E toolset in its 365 Office suite. And Google’s new Imagen takes the next step to video from text prompts. On the business content front, enterprise writing AI startup Regie recently raised $10 million, while interactive AI writing guide developer Writer raised $21 million to improve and standardize marketing copy for businesses. On the much higher end of funding, Grammarly raised a massive $200 million to develop its own AI writing assistant further. And GPT-3 has spawned a whole stable of similar products. Compose.ai raised $2.1 million for a universal auto-complete system, and Copy.ai raised $2.9 million to use GPT-3 to help businesses write advertisements, product descriptions, social media posts, and other text, and new options like Phrasee and Copysmith keep appearing. Enterprise generative AI tools, both text and visual, will only become more popular. Jasper’s goal is to offer an easy entry point for those future users.

“We see our part in this larger technological shift as helping bridge the gap between AI availability and practical applicability by being the platform businesses use to scale their content throughout marketing, sales, and customer service,” Rogenmoser explained in a blog post. “That begins by making generative AI more accessible for businesses, but is also about choosing the right combination of AI models for the right use case and evolving to incorporate the unique styles and knowledge base of each business. We could not be more ready or excited for this challenge.”

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