Typeface Surfaces with $65 Million in Funding
Typeface, the San Francisco-based startup developing a generative AI application for enterprise content creation, emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed $65 million round in venture equity backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and AI rivals Google Ventures and Microsoft’s venture capital fund M12.
Built around a personalized AI core, Typeface creates brand-personalized content at speed and scale via a suite of self-serve solutions, enabling enterprise firms to craft content with ease, speed, and authenticity. “By adding brand affinity to generative AI, Typeface allows enterprises to harness their collective creative power for unique expression of their stories and imagination,” says Typeface CEO and founder, Abhay Parasnis, who was also Adobe’s former chief technology officer. “Now, any company can transform content into a value multiplier, connecting every department and empowering employees to achieve their creative and storytelling goals.”
Generative AI platforms represent a major technological breakthrough for creating content. While AI has been valuable in extracting insights and analytics from proprietary data, generative AI has unlocked powerful new capabilities, creating campaigns, telling stories, and even writing essays and poetry. However, the needs of enterprises differ from those of consumers, who currently comprise the first wave of generative AI adopters. For instance, large businesses require solutions that integrate into their existing workflows and continuously improve by leveraging vast amounts of data and feedback, at the same time ensuring brand consistency and control across multiple departments.
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Typeface is different, company officials say, as it is the first generative AI platform built for enterprise use. “Typeface is at the forefront of a monumental shift in how businesses will create and collaborate,” says Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed. “By democratizing access to this technology, companies can supercharge iterative creation and meaningfully engage with customers unlike ever before.”
IrisCX Announces $4.6 Million Seed Round
Canadian smart video platform IrisCX announced it has received $4.6 million in seed funding from Arthur Ventures, a Minneapolis-based early-growth capital firm that leads investments in business-to-business (B2B) software companies located outside Silicon Valley. IrisCX will use the seed funding to add new capabilities to the company’s platform, hire more people to drive growth, and invest in executing its go-to-market plan, which targets home product and services companies with large operations in the US and Canada. The new round brings IrisCX total funding to $6.8 million.
The IrisCX customer interaction platform allows brands to directly connect with consumers through live and self-guided video throughout the most critical moments of the customer journey. With each video session, IrisCX is able to pull context-driven insights on customer behavior, allowing brands the ability to make intelligent, data-driven decisions.
To date, IrisCX has facilitated more than 30,000 video sessions between product experts and consumers, and brands have achieved customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores of 9.6 on average when using IrisCX, compared to CSAT scores below 7.0 for other home product brands not using IrisCX, the company says. Based in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, IrisCX quintupled its revenue in 2022 and is on track to double its revenue this year.
Bonusly Raises $18.9 Million in Series B Financing
Bonusly, the provider of a recognition and rewards platform headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, announced it has received $18.9 million in Series B funding led by Ankona Capital, a southern California-based growth venture firm that invests in early-growth-stage B2B software companies. Participation in the funding round came from prior investors FirstMark Capital, Access Venture Partners, and Next Frontier Capital. Bonusly will use the new capital to enhance its recognition platform, continue building out its analytics capabilities, and invest in sales and marketing to further expand go-to-market activities.
Ranked by peer review site G2 as No. 1 in employee recognition and No. 3 in employee engagement, Bonusly helps create a culture of recognition in which employees receive meaningful acknowledgement from peers and managers on a weekly basis. The Bonusly recognition platform captures and analyzes real-time data on how organizations work, communicate, and connect, enabling managers and human resources (HR) departments to gain a better understanding of their employees, help promote collaboration, and foster belonging and a stronger culture.
“This new capital will enable us to expand and build on the strong foundation we have in place, enabling companies to meet the constantly changing people challenges of today’s volatile economy,” says Raphael Crawford-Marks, founder and CEO of Bonusly. “Since our Series A, we have seen our valuation more than triple, despite the multiple compression that has occurred in today’s market—a strong recognition of the value we already provide and the even greater opportunity that lies ahead. We’re just getting started.”
Bright Software Secures $2.7 Million
Immersive learning developer Bright Software has raised $2.7 million in an oversubscribed funding round co-led by Ringbolt Capital and Triple Impact Capital. Additional participation came from Riptide Ventures, Cake Ventures, Blu Venture Investors, deftly.vc, and JHH.vc.
Creators of a skill development and immersive learning technology, Bethesda, Maryland-based Bright will use the funds from the round to accelerate product development, especially in the area of AI-powered conversation simulation. Coming on the heels of more than 300% year-over-year revenue growth in 2022, the fund will also help expand the company’s sales and marketing and customer success functions.
Bright offers a dynamic immersive learning platform that harnesses AI and integrates lifelike simulation capabilities across a wide variety of modalities, delivering comprehensive immersive learning programs to its customers. The modalities include conversation simulations using voice, video, or text; software simulations; and decision-making simulations. And by shifting the learning and development (L&D) operating model away from live classes or eLearning toward scalable, iterative practice, Bright helps learners build proficiency more quickly. Data on learner skill proficiency captured throughout the learning journey is aggregated into a detailed dashboard, displaying skill proficiency progress over time.
“Our mission is to put practice at the center of our customers’ learning strategies and help them undeniably prove the ROI of training, says Rob Wright, Bright founder and CEO. “There’s something meaningful about the fact that practice and simulation align both learner and business interests. Learners build skills faster, feel valued, and thrive. Businesses see training costs go down, while performance improves. Given the tough economic and talent markets we’re facing, it’s the right next step in the evolution of L&D.”
QuestionPro Acquires Pundit Consultantz, Appoints New President
QuestionPro, the Austin, Texas-based provider of online survey and research services, announced it has acquired Pundit Consultantz, a healthcare innovation and go-to-market commercialization consultancy headquartered in Chicago.
As part of the agreement, Pundit’s founder and CEO, Arti Bedi Pullins, becomes president and chief healthcare officer at QuestionPro. In her new role, Pullins will lead all revenue generation for QuestionPro in the Americas and also spearhead the expansion of the company’s healthcare and life sciences business. Pullins has more than 20 years of experience in leading business strategy, product innovation, and end-to-end divisional deployment for healthcare, health tech, and health and wellness companies.
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Financial details of the deal were not available, but the transaction builds on the 2020 acquisition by QuestionPro of Care Experience, the Dallas-based CX platform focused on healthcare designed to help health organizations understand the patient’s voice and experience across care. QuestionPro, founded in 2005, offers a platform for conducting surveys, building templates, automating reports, polling, journey mapping, and data visualization. Its customers include the American Cancer Society, Sanofi, GoHealth, Merck, and Elsevier.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to arm clinicians, providers, payors, patients, and researchers within all of healthcare and life sciences to transform the way they collect, analyze, and deliver based on personalized data. Together they can deliver better care to patients,” says Pullins.
Vivek Bhaskaran, co-founder and CEO of QuestionPro, praised Pullins in her work. “Arti is a respected entrepreneur, healthcare, and tech leader who has built an incredibly successful business by helping clients succeed through customer- and patient-centric innovations. There’s no better person to dramatically drive increased revenue and business development as well as transform our healthcare business by combining our teams and platform with her proven process.”
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
