SpeedyBrand uses generative AI to create SEO-optimized content

While working at Vetan, a startup that helps small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) manage employee payroll, Jatin Mehta realized that SMBs often lack of tools to thrive online with organic sales. The cost of hiring an agency exceeds their budget, and creating content is costly, both in terms of time and money.

"Having a great online presence is essential for e-commerce stores like Shopify and Woo, because online traffic is the bread and butter of their business," Mehta told TechCrunch in an email interview. mail. “But existing content marketing solutions are not comprehensive and require search engine optimization (SEO) expertise. Companies need multiple SEO tools and hire content strategists, writers and agencies to outsource their content marketing work."

So, along with Ranti Dev Sharma and Ayush Jasuja, Mehta co-founded SpeedyBrand, which aims to bring affordable, “high-quality” SEO content to SMBs using generative AI. SpeedyBrand announced today that it has raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by GV (Google's venture arm) and YCombinator, which values ​​the company at $15 million after financing.

SpeedyBrand's platform, powered by generative AI, can create custom SEO-optimized content, including websites and social media posts, for brands. Brands first choose a topic. Then they ask the platform to generate text and suggest images that might be appropriate for the type of content they are generating.

From the SpeedyBrand dashboard, generated content can be edited and customized before being published on different channels. An analytics component allows brands to track the performance of content once it's live.

Image credits: SpeedyBrand

“The economic downturn requires profitable marketing solutions,” Mehta said. "Speedy is well positioned to help businesses with an affordable solution."

But there are reasons to be wary of technology.

For one thing, generative AI, no matter how good, can – and does – run wild. Thanks to a phenomenon known as "hallucination", AI models sometimes make up facts with confidence. And, due to biases and other imbalances in their training data, the text-generating AI can spit out toxic and extremely offensive remarks.

In another potential problem for brands, generative AI has been shown to plagiarize copyrighted works. A study found that an indirect predecessor to ChatGPT, GPT-2, can be instructed to "copy and paste" entire paragraphs from its training data.

Then there is the issue of generative AI spamming the internet. As James Vincent of The Verge wrote in a recent article, generative AI models are changing the economics of the web, making it cheaper and easier to generate lower quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools to verify news sources, exposed hundreds of ad-supported sites with generic-sounding names containing misinformation created with generative AI.

Mehta claims that SpeedyBrand is not a content mill – and that it takes steps to mitigate any toxic content that the platform's AI may generate. SpeedyBrand's AI can be customized to brand tone and generates content that's proven to be "plagiarism-free", it claims, incorporating feedback from content edits to improve future output.

How true is all of this? It's hard to say without a third-party audit. But brands, no doubt eager to jump on the generative AI bandwagon, seem to be embracing SpeedyBrand.

The company, which has a team of six, has about 50 paying customers and more than 1,000 users. Annual recurring revenue is $100,000, and Mehta expects it to reach $1 million next year.

That's impressive considering the competition. SpeedyBrand takes on Typeface, which recently emerged...