AI content creation and collaboration platform Narrato today announced a $1M pre-seed round, led by AirTree Ventures, a leading venture capital firm with a portfolio of breakout tech companies including Canva, Linktree, Immutable and Employment Hero among others. The round also saw participation from community powered global venture fund TheFund and several marquee angel investors, including Ruchi Kalra and Bhuvan Gupta, co-founders of OfBusiness, and Shreesha Ramdas, a serial entrepreneur. The company said it will use the funds to further develop and enhance its platform and simultaneously invest in marketing to penetrate further in the US market.
Narrato’s platform allows users to use generative AI to ideate, create, collaborate and publish content all in one place. The startup was founded in January 2022 by serial entrepreneur Sophia Solanki, with over 16 years of experience in the content and marketing space. The company already counts an impressive line-up of clients including Chargebee, Preply, Zepto, Park+, and Rocketlane, among others.
The content marketing sector is estimated to grow by $584 billion between 2022 and 2027, but as the downturn has caused companies to be more cost-conscious, marketers feel the pressure to create more content but with limited resources. Content creation is effort intensive and time-consuming, a problem that Narrato is solving with generative AI as assistive tech.
“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,” said Sophia Solanki, founder of Narrato. “We have built Narrato to be the AI-powered content workspace where companies can bring their entire marketing workflow and use AI seamlessly at the right moments.”
At the core of Narrato is the AI content assistant which assists with ideation, creation (text and image content generation) and optimization. Narrato workflow and automation features help teams create more content efficiently and collaboratively, saving money and time. “Having already built and sold another AI content SaaS startup and scaled my earlier agency to thousands of customers, I have first-hand seen the impact that content and AI can deliver to fuel demand generation and growth,” Sophia added. “I have also experienced the pain of managing and scaling content creation with the distributed software stack.”
“At AirTree we love to be right by a founder's side, right from the start of their journey and we’re thrilled to be leading Narrato’s pre-seed round,” said Elicia McDonald, partner at AirTree. “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’ve bootstrapped to date.”
Businesses have increasingly seen the impacts of content marketing in the last decade; It has a better ROI than paid marketing, is more cost effective than expensive advertising, and makes more sense in the present marketing landscape. Using Narrato’s AI content workspace, Preply has already seen a jump of 40% in its content production and has greatly benefited from the streamlined experience Narrato has brought to their content workflow. Rocketlane has seen a similar impact on their content creation process with generative AI reducing their content’s time to market significantly.
