While working at Vetan, a startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) manage employee payroll, Jatin Mehta realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic sales. The cost of hiring an agency is beyond your budget and generating content is expensive, both in terms of time and money.

“Having a great online presence is critical for eCommerce stores like Shopify and Woo, as online traffic is the bread and butter of your business,” Mehta told TechCrunch in an email interview. “But existing content marketing solutions are not complete and require expertise in search engine optimization (SEO). Businesses need multiple SEO tools and hire content strategists, writers, and agencies to outsource their content marketing work.”

So, along with Ranti Dev Sharma and Ayush Jasuja, Mehta co-founded SpeedyBrand, which aims to bring “high-quality” and affordable SEO content to SMBs using generative AI. SpeedyBrand announced today that it has raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by GV (Google’s venture arm) and Y Combinator that values ​​the company at $15 million after the money.

SpeedyBrand’s platform, powered by generative AI, can create personalized SEO-optimized content, including websites and social media posts, for brands. Brands first choose a theme. They then have the platform generate text and suggest images that might be appropriate for the type of content they are generating.

From the SpeedyBrand dashboard, the generated content can be further edited and customized before posting to multiple channels. An analytics component allows brands to track content performance once it’s live.

“The economic slowdown requires cost-effective marketing solutions,” Mehta said. “Speedy is well positioned to help businesses with an affordable solution.”

But there are reasons to be wary of technology.

For one thing, generative AI, no matter how good it is, can, and does, run amok. Thanks to a phenomenon known as “hallucination”, AI models sometimes make up facts with confidence. And, as a result of biases and other imbalances in your training data, the text-generating AI can return toxic, tremendously offensive comments

In another potential problem for brands, generative AI has been shown to plagiarize copyrighted works. One study discovered that an indirect predecessor of ChatGPT, GPT-2, can be asked to “copy and paste” entire paragraphs of your training data.

Then there’s the matter of generative AI spamming the internet. As The Verge’s James Vincent wrote in a recent article piece, generative AI models are changing the economics of the web, making it cheaper and easier to generate lower-quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools for investigating news sources, has exposed Hundreds of ad-supported sites with generic-sounding names that present misinformation created with generative AI.

Mehta claims that SpeedyBrand is not a content factory, and that it takes steps to mitigate any toxic content that the platform’s AI might generate. SpeedyBrand’s AI can be customized to the brand’s tone and generates content that is demonstrably “plagiarism-free,” he says, incorporating feedback from content edits to improve future output.

To what extent is all this true? It’s hard to say without a third-party audit. But brands, no doubt eager to jump on the generative AI bandwagon, appear to be embracing SpeedyBrand.

The company, which has a team of six, has around 50 paying customers and more than 1,000 users. Annual recurring revenue stands at $100,000 and Mehta anticipates it will reach $1 million next year.

That’s impressive considering the competition. SpeedyBrand faces typography, which recently came out of hiding with $65 million in venture capital. startups like Movie, copyist, copy.ai, sale scale, Jasper, omneky and Regie.aithey are also using generative AI to create (apparently) better marketing copy, images, and even video for ads, websites, and emails.

It is a large and growing market. statist reports that 87% of current AI users are already using, or considering using, AI to improve their email marketing. Other report projects that the generative AI market will be worth more than $110 billion by 2030.

Given the almost half of SMB owners handle content marketing themselves, there is an even stronger incentive within that cohort to adopt tools that could, on the surface at least, save time, money, and a major headache.

“Speedy saves a company’s marketing staff hours of marketing hustle, from strategy to content generation to posting,” Mehta said. “Speedy gives them and their team back hours every day so they can focus on the core of their business.”

With the proceeds from the funding round, SpeedyBrand plans to implement additional tools for generating text and images.