Toronto-based ContentFly, which offers an on-demand content creation platform, has closed an $11.2 million CAD ($9 million USD) Series A round of funding.
The raise was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator (YC), Global Founders Capital, and a number of additional investors, including Alex Norman, who is a partner at N49P Ventures and co-founder and managing director of TechToronto.
“We firmly believe the future of content is in enabling great writers with great AI.”
ContentFly CEO Naeem Talukdar told BetaKit several of the investors in this round joined through simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs), including YC, and said this round represents the first round of funding for the startup.
Founded in 2018, ContentFly’s platform is aimed to help businesses create content. Users can create blog posts, social posts, and email copy. Using the platform, businesses upload a brief about the content they want to be written, as well as the desired word length. The platform takes a few days of researching to match the business with a writer. A writer will then craft the copy and revisions can be made free of charge. The company claims it has already helped more than 2,000 businesses scale content creation and connect with over 1,000 writers.
ContentFly is one of 13 Canadian startups that participated in YC’s 2021 Winter Batch.
The new funding will be used by the startup to double down on its AI capabilities, grow its team of content writers, and expand its platform.
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“A lot of products recently are trying to replace writers with AI,” Talukdar told BetaKit in an emailed statement. “We firmly believe the future of content is in enabling great writers with great AI. Our funding will allow us to grow our marketplace of talented content writers, build a suite of cutting edge AI tools to equip them with, and expand our platform to be an all-in-one suite for any company that wants to do great content marketing.”
In a recent blog post on the Series A round, Talukdar wrote the startup plans to allow brands to combine ContentFly’s marketplace with AI, to lower content creation costs, improve efficiencies, and create better content. The blog highlighted GTP-3, a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text, as one of the types of AI it planned to use.
Another priority for ContentFly is to provide end-to-end, integrated content marketing to users. The company said it plans to offer an “all-in-one platform for content marketing,” which would allow businesses to build, manage and scale their content marketing programs.
Image source Unsplash. Photo by Nick Morrison.