Whether it's informing customers, finding new customers, or SEO, every business with a presence on the web is, to some degree, in the content business. This means managing the creation of these texts and images, updating them, and possibly optimizing them so that search engines can index and rank them. Large-scale language models (LLMs) are very good at generating text, so it's no surprise that companies expect their content manipulation tools to also generate text and images (Freelance Copy (This is unwelcome news for writers.)
AirOps, which today announced a $15.5 million Series A funding round, is focused on managing and generating content at scale and wants to be an all-in-one platform to do it all.
In its early days, the company had a fairly broad mandate. When we first wrote about AirOps after a $7 million seed round in 2023, the team was building an LLM-based tool that enabled any company to create AI-enabled applications.
Image credit: AirOps
“It was a process of thinking about where in the economy the model could deliver real value to real customers,” AirOps co-founder and CEO Alex Halliday told me. After the original product launch, the team spoke with many customers to better understand the problems they were trying to solve with platforms like the early versions of AirOps.
As many companies now realize, there are areas where LLMs cannot yet be relied upon to perform based on consistent benchmarks. But for better or worse, one area they do pretty well is content generation.
“This was a little ironic because when we first started working on the LLM, we were thinking about content and not so much about SEO. It seemed like a problem that had been solved,” AirOps co-founder Matt Hummel said. But it's also very easy to use these models to create bad content that doesn't fit your company's brand. And the real problems begin when you have to manage and update this suddenly large amount of text.
That's where AirOps comes in. AirOps allows businesses to generate text and images using virtually any popular model (optionally bringing their own API keys). Companies can also put up what we call guardrails. It is also necessary to keep abreast of human information. We also focus on streamlining the overall workflow from content generation to optimization.
Image credit: AirOps
It's no secret that the internet is rapidly filling up with monotonous, often incorrect, LLM-generated writing. The AirOps team knows this, and throughout the conversation they emphasized that the team is focused on quality.
“The core thing we reiterate to our customers is that when working with LLM, the quality of the content coming in is equal to the quality of the content coming out,” Halliday said. “We help our customers internally find little nuggets, little goldmines that they can turn into content.”
Halliday, who previously ran the product at Masterclass, also stressed that he believes educating customers is key.
To build the product and begin go-to-market efforts, AirOps is raising Series A funding. The round was led by Unusual Ventures with participation from Wing VC, Founder Collective, Xfund, and Alt Capital.