Typeface, a generative AI startup specializing in enterprise use cases, acquired two corporations just over a 12 months ago after raising $100 million and valuing the corporate at $1 billion.
Typeface announced on Monday the acquisition of Treat, an organization that uses artificial intelligence to create personalized photo products, and Narrato, an AI-powered content creation and management platform.
Treat and Narrato will “enrich (Typeface's) multimodal capabilities,” the corporate said in a press release, while “driving (its) vision of end-to-end content lifecycle transformation.”
“Building on our foundation of multimodal AI workflows, the best-in-class AI technologies and talent from these acquisitions further enrich our visual and textual capabilities,” Typeface wrote within the press release. “By integrating these technologies, we’re elevating the general Typeface portfolio.”
Founded in 2022 by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, Typeface offers text and image generation tools, a fine-tuning engine to personalize AI to a brand's style, and integrations with third-party apps, software, and services. Typeface claims to have a greater emphasis on branding and privacy than its competitors within the generative AI space. For example, Typeface trains dedicated AI models for every customer to make sure their assets and activities remain private.
How do Treat and Narrato fit into this vision? Well, each were founded by founders who’re very aware of the company landscape. And – not surprisingly – the startups offer products that appeal to the form of corporate customers that Typeface does business with.
New York-based Treat, founded by Matt Osman and former Drizly CTO Hugh Hunter, uses an organization's customer data to create product images that include elements proven to resonate with certain demographics. For example, if a fruit retailer's data suggests that younger men prefer food ads that show an individual eating the product, Treat can create an ad that shows someone biting into fruit.
An Australian company, Narrato – which coincidentally was also founded in 2022 – sells access to an “AI content assistant” designed to assist organizations achieve their internal content creation and planning goals. As founder Sophia Solanki explained to TechCrunch in an interview last March, Narrato customers also get collaboration and workflow tools, including templates for articles, video scripts, blogs, emails, social media content, art, and more.
Treat raised not less than $8.5 million from investors including Greylock prior to the acquisition, while Narrato raised greater than $1 million from AirTree Ventures, OfBusiness and serial entrepreneur Shreesha Ramdas.
Typeface didn’t disclose the terms of the 2 acquisitions.
Treat and Narrato are the third and fourth acquisitions for Typeface, which bought AI photo and video editing suite TensorTour in January and chatbot app Cypher in May. It's unclear how much those deals have dented Typeface's $165 million war chest.
