To a point, each enterprise that has a presence on the internet is within the content material enterprise — whether or not that’s for informing prospects, discovering new shoppers, or for search engine optimisation. Meaning managing the manufacturing of these texts and pictures, updating them, and probably optimizing them for a search engine to index and rank. Since massive language fashions (LLMs) are fairly good at producing textual content, it’s no shock (and unwelcome information for freelance copywriters) that companies now count on their content material operations instruments to additionally generate textual content and pictures for them.
AirOps, which is asserting a $15.5 million Collection A funding spherical immediately, needs to be the all-in-one platform for doing all of that, with a spotlight of managing and producing content material at scale.
In its early days, the corporate had a considerably broader remit. Once we first wrote about AirOps after its $7 million seed spherical in 2023, the staff was constructing an LLM-based instrument that allowed any enterprise to create AI-enabled purposes.
“It’s just been this process of figuring out where can the models deliver real value in the economy for real customers,” AirOps co-founder and CEO Alex Halliday advised me. After launching the unique product, the staff talked to a variety of prospects to get a greater grip on the issues they had been making an attempt to unravel with a platform just like the early model of AirOps.
As many companies have now realized, there are areas the place you possibly can’t but depend on LLMs to carry out to a constant benchmark. However one space the place they do effectively sufficient — for higher or worse — is producing content material.
“It was a little bit ironic, because when we first started working with LLMs — think content and maybe less SEO — content seemed like a solved problem with all the first kind of generation of models,” AirOps co-founder Matt Hammel stated. Nevertheless it’s additionally far too simple to get these fashions to create dangerous content material that doesn’t match an organization’s model — and the actual issues begin as soon as it’s important to handle and replace this sudden plethora of textual content.
That’s the place AirOps is available in. It permits companies to make use of nearly any standard mannequin (and convey their very own API keys to them, in the event that they need to) to generate textual content and pictures, and it permits corporations to place what it calls guardrails round this, whereas additionally maintaining people within the loop. It additionally focuses on streamlining the general workflow from content material technology to optimization.
It’s no secret that the web is rapidly filling up with drab LLM-generated slop that’s usually incorrect. The AirOps staff is conscious of this and all through the dialog, the staff burdened that its focus is on high quality.
“The core thing we tell customers again and again is that when working with LLMs, the quality of the content in equals the quality of the content out,” Halliday stated. “We help the customers find these little nuggets or little gold mines internally that they can transform into content.”
Halliday, who beforehand ran product at Masterclass, additionally burdened that he believes educating prospects is vital.
To construct out the product and kickstart its go-to-market operations, AirOps has now raised its Collection A. The spherical was led by Uncommon Ventures, with participation from Wing VC, Founder Collective, Xfund, and Alt Capital.
