As the enthusiasm around AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, a startup developing what it describes as an \u201cAI content\u201d platform, has raised $125 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. The tranche is the company\u2019s first, remarkably, and comes as Jasper is in the process of acquiring AI startup Outwrite, a grammar and style checker with more than a million users worldwide.<\/p>\n
CEO Dave Rogenmoser tells the funding will be put toward building out Jasper\u2019s core products, improving the customer experience and bringing Jasper\u2019s 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\u2019ll also support Jasper\u2019s ongoing effort to fold the Outwrite brand under its own, he said, and unify the two companies\u2019 offerings in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo build a market leading company in generative AI we need the appropriate infrastructure \u2014 that\u2019s what we\u2019ll raise [new] capital for,\u201d Rogenmoser told in an email interview. \u201cWe want to build a world-class business, [and] to do that we need capital and highly strategic partners.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rogenmoser launched Jasper early last year with J.P. Morgan and Chris Hull, who together largely bootstrapped the company. Rogenmoser is a Y Combinator alum, having co-founded Proof, a startup that used algorithms to customize businesses\u2019 websites. Morgan and Hull \u2014 who have backgrounds in business-to-business marketing and process automation \u2014 also helped to co-launch Proof, whose technology laid the groundwork for Jasper.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a marketer by trade and have long been interested in AI and saw how it was becoming more tangible and accessible \u2014 moving from theory and academia into a transformative, applied technology that could help people,\u201d Rogenmoser said. \u201cWith the advent of [OpenAI\u2019s] GPT-3, we saw an opportunity to launch an AI content platform that could help businesses and professional creators brainstorm and do their work more quickly and efficiently.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jasper leverages AI to generate content for blog articles, social media posts, website copy and more. Using the platform, customers can describe in natural language what they want Jasper to write, whether a keyword-rich piece designed to rank well in search engines or existing content repurposed with additional context.<\/p>\n
Plenty of startups also do this \u2014 Copy.ai, WriteSonic, Peppertype, Wordtune and Simplified to name a few. In fact, recently wrote a survey of the market for AI-powered, copy-generating adtech vendors, which is robust. Copysmith last April secured $10 million in financing for its AI-powered content generation platform, while Copy.ai\u00a0closed a $10 million round in October.<\/p>\n
Rogenmoser claims that Jasper\u2019s language models \u2014 trained on 10% of the web and fine-tuned for \u201ccustomer specificity\u201d \u2014 set it apart. Among other apps and services, they power Jasper\u2019s browser extension for Chrome that delivers contextual content recommendations across platforms including Google Docs, Gmail, Notion and Hubspot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe folks that will win at generative AI will be the ones that have the best feedback loops,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re committed to building the best feedback to AI loop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jasper\u2019s other differentiator, Rogenmoser says, is Jasper Art, a recently launched AI art-generating system. As with systems such as DALL-E 2, Jasper Art turns prompts into images, letting users adjust aspects like the medium (e.g., \u201cCanvas,\u201d \u201cPastel\u201d), art style (\u201cVan Gogh\u201d) and mood.<\/p>\n
![\"Jasper](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/630a6dd1bfb04b4864a48fe1_Jasper-Art.jpg\")
<\/p>\nImage Credits:<\/strong> Jasper<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While a number of free and paid alternatives to Jasper Art exist (see Stable Diffusion, Pixelz.ai and Midjourney, to name a few) Rogenmoser pitches it as an art-generating system specifically designed for marketing applications, like creating copyright-free stock photos. He says that one early adopter, Mongoose Media, is using Jasper Art to generate flat lays and backgrounds \u201cat scale\u201d around product images for its designers.<\/p>\n Of course, like other AI text-to-image systems, Jasper Art has limitations. An FAQ on the product page notes that the system, which has a content filter to attempt to detect \u201csensitive\u201d or \u201cunsafe\u201d images, such as those depicting violence, might contain biases that lead it to generate images reinforcing negative stereotypes (like CEOs who are mostly white and male).<\/p>\n Under the terms of Jasper Art\u2019s license, customers also don\u2019t have the exclusive right to use generated images. The system\u2019s generations are free for anyone to repurpose and remix \u2014 perhaps an attempt by Jasper to mitigate future intellectual property\u00a0and fair use challenges. Systems like Jasper are often trained on billions of images from around the web, some of which are copyrighted, leading image hosts like Getty Images to ban AI-generated art for fear of sparking legal battles.<\/p>\n Rogenmoser acknowledged that there\u2019s \u201cmuch to be learned\u201d about boundaries around AI content generation tools and what regulation might look like in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cThe major challenge that the AI generation industry faces is around ethics in regard to data and consumer acceptance,\u201d he said. \u201cWhile we are in constant awe of the power of our technology, we viscerally aware of the responsibility that assigns us. We are committed to remaining accountable for the power of technology but we also acknowledge that our control is limited.\u201d<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong> Jasper<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The controversies haven\u2019t scared marketers away, who appear eager to embrace AI technologies for text and image generation.\u00a0According to a 2021 survey by Phrasee, 63% of marketers would consider investing in AI to generate and optimize ad copy. It\u2019s an admittedly biased finding \u2014 Phrasee sells AI-powered copy generation software. But vendor-neutral analytics firm Statista reports\u00a0that 87% of current AI adopters are already using, or considering using, AI for sales forecasting and improving their email marketing.<\/p>\n According to Rogenmoser, Jasper has more than 70,000 customers and generated $40 million in revenue last year. The company expects to end 2022 with over double that revenue \u2014 $90 million \u2014 buoyed by the buzz around AI for adtech and martech.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are a hypergrowth company that is also focused on profitability,\u201d Rogenmoser said. \u201cThe pandemic has accelerated this business. As organizations look for ways to find efficiencies within teams, AI generation is the natural choice to augment creators and teams.\u201d<\/p>\n Added Insight Partners\u2019 Jeff Horing in an emailed statement: \u201cIt\u2019s not often that you see a shift as significant as generative AI, and Jasper is positioned to be a platform to transform the way businesses develop content and convey ideas. The company has built an enormous community around AI in such a short time, and we see new use cases shared every day, including in the enterprise. We look forward to partnering with the Jasper team as they continue to grow and expand on their vision.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the enthusiasm around AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, a startup developing what it describes as an \u201cAI content\u201d platform, has raised $125 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. The tranche is the company\u2019s first, remarkably, and comes as Jasper is in the process of acquiring AI startup Outwrite, a grammar and style […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1227810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1227808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1227808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1227808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1227808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1227808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Jasper](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/file-tGhPKaZbns.png\")
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