AirTree Ventures has led a $US1 million ($1.4 million) pre-seed funding round for US tech start-up Narrato.
Narrato was founded early last year by San Francisco-based Australian serial entrepreneur Sophia Solanki.
The start-up’s software platform enables marketers and creatives to generate content briefs, concepts and images with the help of artificial (AI).
The raise was supported by New York based global pre-seed investment firm The Fund, business-to-business (B2B) commerce platform OfBusiness, and serial entrepreneur Shreesha Ramdas.
Solanki was previously co-founder − with Vishal Dutta − of DrumUp a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business that tracks the accessing of online content across social media and news outlets and feeds back information to marketers.
Solanki and Dutta sold DrumUp about six years ago and have since been involved in developing custom content writing service Godot Media. Solanki has stepped back from that venture to focus on Narrato.
The pre-seed capital will be used to further develop Narrato’s technology and build its market in 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,” Solanki said.
“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.”
Narrato’s main feature is an AI content assistant that helps with planning, including automatic brief generation, content creation and optimisation. It also includes collaboration and workflow tools and automated publishing features.
For both AI and non-AI content creation, users choose from templates, including blogs, articles, web copy, emails, video scripts, social media content and art. AI content creation is accessed through a chat style feature.
Narrato has direct and indirect competitors but Solanki says her team are seeking to differentiate its offering by embedding generative AI into the entire marketing and content creation workflow in a single platform.
Customers to date include Australian investment app business Pearler, payment software business ChargeBee, language learning app Preply and customer onboarding software provider Rocketlane.
AirTree partner Elicia McDonald said: “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. She has a strong connection to the problem and has achieved impressive traction for a company at such an early stage, especially considering they have boot-strapped to date.”
Image: Narrato founder Sophia Solanki.