To some extent, every business on the web is in the content business, whether it’s informing customers, finding new customers, or for SEO. This means managing the production of these texts and images, updating them and potentially optimizing them so that a search engine can index and rank them. Given that large language models (LLMs) are quite effective at generating text, it’s no surprise (and bad news for freelance writers) that companies now expect their language mining tools to content also generate text and images for them.
AirOps, which today announces a $15.5 million Series A funding round, aims to be the all-in-one platform to do it all, with a focus on managing and generating content at scale.
In his first daysthe company had a significantly broader mandate. When we first wrote about AirOps after its $7 million seed round in 2023, the team was building an LLM-based tool that would enable any company to build AI-driven applications .
“It’s just about figuring out where models can deliver real economic value to real customers,” co-founder and CEO of AirOps. Alex Halliday told me. After launching the original product, the team spoke with numerous customers to better understand the problems they were trying to solve with a platform like the first version of AirOps.
As many companies have now realized, there are areas where you cannot yet rely on LLMs to operate to a consistent benchmark. But one area where they do quite well – for better or worse – is content generation.
“It was a little ironic, because when we started working with LLMs – think content and maybe less SEO – content seemed to be a problem solved with all the first generation models,” said Matt Hammel , co-founder of AirOps. But it’s also far too easy to get these templates to create bad content that doesn’t fit a company’s brand – and the real problems start once you have to manage and update this sudden plethora of text.
That’s where AirOps comes in. It allows businesses to use virtually any popular template (and bring their own API keys to it, if they wish) to generate text and images, and it allows companies to put what they call guardrails around it, while also keeping humans in the loop. It also focuses on streamlining the overall workflow from content generation to optimization.
It’s no secret that the Internet quickly fills up with dull LLM-generated slop that is often incorrect. The AirOps team is aware of this and throughout the conversation the team emphasized that they are focused on quality.
“What we tell our clients all the time is that when we work with LLMs, the quality of the content coming in is equal to the quality of the content going out,” Halliday said. “We help clients find these little nuggets or goldmines internally that they can turn into content. »
Halliday, who previously led product at Masterclass, also emphasized that he believes educating customers is key.
To develop the product and launch its commercialization operations, AirOps has now raised its Series A. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from Wing VC, Founder Collective, Xfund and Alt Capital.
