Sep 16, 2024

Image Credits: girafchik123 / Getty Images Typeface, a generative AI startup focused on enterprise use cases, has acquired a pair of companies just over a year after raising $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Typeface revealed on Monday that it’s purchased Treat, a company using AI 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 company said in a press release, while “propelling [its] vision of end-to-end content lifecycle transformation.” “Building on our foundation of multimodal AI workflows, these acquisitions’ top-tier AI technology and talent further enrich our visual and textual capabilities,” Typeface wrote in the release. “By integrating these technologies, we’re supercharging the entire Typeface portfolio.” Typeface, founded in 2022 by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, offers tools for text and image generation, a fine-tuning engine to personalize AI to a brand’s style and integrations with third-party apps, software and services. Typeface claims to place a greater emphasis on brand governance and privacy than its generative AI rivals; for example, Typeface trains dedicated AI models for each customer to ensure their assets and activity remain private. So how do Treat and Narrato fit into this vision? Well, both were started by founders well-acquainted with the enterprise landscape. And — not for nothing — the startups offer products appealing the sorts of corporate clients with whom Typeface does business. NYC-based Treat, the brainchild of Matt Osman and ex-Drizly CTO Hugh Hunter, uses a company’s data on customers to generate product images that incorporate elements known to perform well with certain target demographics. For example, if a fruit vendor’s data suggested that younger men prefer seeing food ads that show a person eating the product, Treat may create an ad that depicts someone biting into fruit. An image generated by Treat. Image Credits: Treat An Australian venture, Narrato — which coincidentally also launched in 2022 — sells access to an “AI content assistant” designed to help orgs 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. Image Credits: Narrato Treat raised at least $8.5 million from investors including Greylock prior to the acquisition, while Narrato manage to raise more than $1 million from AirTree Ventures, OfBusiness and serial entrepreneur Shreesha Ramdas. Typeface wouldn’t disclose the terms of either acquisition. Treat and Narrato mark the third and fourth acquisitions for Typeface, which purchased AI photo and video editing suite TensorTour in January and chatbot app Cypher in May. It’s unclear how much of a dent those deals have made in Typeface’s $165 million warchest. More TechCrunch