SAN FRANCISCO — Simplified, an AI-powered content creation, and marketing platform that’s looking to take on Canva, announced an $8.5 million seed funding round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Khosla Ventures and Wing Venture Capital. The round also included investors Uncorrelated Ventures, 8-Bit Capital, Mads Johnsen (CPO, Calm), Manik Gupta (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft) Ankur Nagpal (Founder of Teachable, Vibe Capital).
Brands and content creators around the world are using Simplified to create multi-channel marketing campaigns at lightning speed. “We’re building a space where teams can come together, unleash their creativity, and create more content— while spending less time and money. We’re dedicated to making content creation seamless and accessible for teams everywhere,” says Simplified CEO and co-founder KD Deshpande.
The investment will further Simplified’s mission of making content creation fast, automated, and affordable with more templates, one-click video tools, and no-code design features. The funding will also amplify Simplified’s machine learning models, enhance the AI copywriting experience, and expand support for languages like Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, French, and Malay. In just 5 months, Simplified has soared in popularity globally, surpassing 150,000 new users and generating 300 million words through its AI copywriting tool.
When Simplified launched last year, the pandemic had led to more users creating and consuming content online faster than ever. But current tools kept content creation siloed, slow, and disconnected. Now, in a remote-first world, the need for a seamlessly connected, high-speed marketing workflow is more apparent than ever. As the next generation of marketers demands speed and simplicity, Simplified is betting that it’s all-in-one platform, powered by AI, will bring content creation into the future.
“As content creation emerges as a necessity for businesses everywhere, we’re excited to bring creators a product that can replace all the single-purpose tools that are slowing them down and costing them money. Instead of switching between a design app, a copywriting app, a publishing platform, and a communication tool, Simplified connects people with their teams and their customers so they can start and finish creating in the same tab and get work done faster,” says Ajay Yadav, Simplified COO and Co-Founder.
Aimed at marketers and content creators, Simplified is one of the only design tools to use AI and machine learning to automate every aspect of the content creation process. For example, the app can automatically generate shareable content, complete with copy, images, layouts, and sizing, all created by the platform’s AI assistant. The app’s additional benefit for marketers is its ability to rapidly scale one piece of content into thousands as their marketing needs grow. The platform also has real-time collaboration tools and integrations with popular apps like Google Drive and Shopify to streamline the complicated workflows that make marketing challenging to manage and scale among teams.
