12 Hot AI Startups That Brands Are Working With

While buzzy AI startups like OpenAI and Stable Diffusion have caught marketers’ attention, many lesser-known gen AI startups have secured investments and contracts with major brands such as L'Oréal, ESPN, Pepsi, and Garnier. AI funding in the U.S. grew by 14% year-over-year in 2023, (OpenAI released ChatGPT in Nov. 2022), raising $42.5 billion across 2,500 equity rounds, per CB Insights. There is a ballooning number of gen AI startups—Dealroom counts some 1,200—which are solving problems for marketers like simplifying ad creation across images and video or addressing AI ethical concerns like copyright and fair use. To make sense of this vibrant market, ADWEEK spoke to analysts, experts and startups to find 12 emerging startups (listed alphabetically) that capture brands' attention. Agencies Tap Into Benefits of AI-Powered Focus Groups Adzedek The problem it solves: This two-person startup serves ads within custom GPTs from OpenAI’s GPT store and inside chatbot apps built on OpenAI’s API. ChatGPT's U.S. traffic is up 33% year-over-year, and Custom GPTs garnered 56.5 million visits in March alone, per Similarweb. Founded in late 2023, brands can pre-select custom GPTs where they want their sponsored ads to appear, such as 'men's health' GPT or 'programming' GPT. Brands can hyperlink these ads, which appear towards the end of the answer, to a destination. “We didn't want to turn these models into salespeople,” co-founder Abdullah Ilyas to ADWEEK. “It was very clear that we want our ads separate from the original message itself.” However, most custom GPT users are academics and researchers, said Ilyas, limiting the scope of B2C brands. Adzedek uses a revenue-sharing model, retaining 25%. Brands it works with: AI startups such as Osum AI (which targets academics and researchers). Augie The problem it solves: Augie is a GPT-3-powered video creation and editing tool, backed by licensed content from Getty Images. It uses existing gen AI tools like Midjourney for video content creation. People can upload text or audio clips and Augie analyses the context to generate videos that align with the provided script, CEO Jeremy Toeman told ADWEEK. A collaboration with text-to-speech AI startup Eleven Labs lets Augie incorporate AI voices in various dialects into the final video. Creating ads for social media is Augie’s most common use case, said Toeman, but many of its enterprise clients use it to create promotional content. Brands: Toeman wouldn't name specific brands, but it counts ecommerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands as clients. Lifestyle publishers also use it to create video summaries with relevant images of articles. Funding: Seed financing last September with $3.1 million led by Unlock Venture Partners. Dropbox Ventures, Flying Fish Ventures and Hyde Park Venture Partners were also participants. Bria The problem it solves: Founded in 2020, Israel-based Bria is an AI image generator powered by Getty Images (also a minority investor), as well as other stock libraries like Alamy and Envato. The open platform lets brands access and train the model with its brand style, generating custom images to create assets like static ads. “The idea is to enable visual communication at scale,” said CEO Yair Adato. Bria charges enterprises for access to the platform and shares revenue with its various data owners, according to Adato. Brands: L'Oréal and other brand clients of WPP and Publicis Funding: Secure $24 million in a Series A funding round in February led by GFT Ventures, Intel Capital and Entree Capital. The startup also snagged investment from Publicis Groupe to build its text-to-video generation capabilities. Bria plans to raise Series B funding by the end of this year, Adato told ADWEEK. Direqt The problem it solves: Founded in 2017, Direqt helps publishers grow and monetize conversational AI chatbots trained on their content. The chatbot, integrated into publishers' websites, initiates conversations and recommends stories to drive site traffic. Direqt works with AI vendors like OpenAI and Google to integrate large language models (LLMs) into chatbots, letting publishers customize chatbot experiences. Publishers can emulate the ChatGPT experience or create quizzes tailored to the publisher's editorial strategy. “The chatbots also provide editorial teams with a new rich source of reader insights and interests based on what users are chatting about, and help publishers collect first-party data,” said co-founder Nick Martin. Direqt has plans to integrate ads into its chatbots, said Martin. Brand: Over 70 publishers including ESPN, Wired, Vogue, and GQ. Funding: Seed funding of $4.5 million in October last year from entrepreneurs including Todd Parker, former global head of business messaging at Google, Peter Callahan, former CEO of American Media, and NFL Hall of Famer Dan Marino. Go Charlie The problem it solves: Launched in May 2022, Go Charlie is an AI copywriting tool for enterprise companies to create SEO-driven articles, blog posts and ad copy for social media. “We're focused on the benefit [AI] provides to customers which is helping drive traffic to their sites to help them generate more sales,” said co-founder and chief business officer Brennan Woodruff. Brands can upload their product offerings or provide brand guidelines within the LLM to ensure the AI output remains within brand guidelines. “The content that comes out of us has a higher propensity to convert customers when they view it or to induce click-through,” said Woodruff. Brands: Woodruff wouldn't share brand names, but global ecommerce luxury retailer brands are clients, as well as clients of agency Pereira O'Dell’s Silverside AI and performance marketing agency Hawke Media. Funding: Secured $2 million in pre-seed funding from SRI International in September last year. With a founding team of four, Go Charlie plans to pursue seed funding later this year. Official AI The problem it solves: Official AI is building a marketplace for licensing and authenticating names and images of celebrities, actors, and creators in gen AI media. Celebrities and creators seeking brand partnerships can specify attributes like height, skin tone, and voice likeness and can track and monetize the use of this data. Ad agencies must undergo an approval process before using the talent's licensed data. The goal, according to its CEO Dave Siegfried, is to provide artists and celebrities with a mechanism where they can give consent, gain credit and compensation for their work within gen AI. Brand: Siegfried wouldn't share specific clients, but it is working with actors, musicians, professional athletes, models and gamers influencers, plus brand clients from agency Pereira O'Dell’s Silverside AI. Funding: Raised $1 million in August last year in pre-seed led by Pioneer Square labs and Mūdita ventures. Pika The problem it solves: Founded last year, Pika’s text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video capabilities let brands test ads using storyboards, simplifying and reducing the cost of creating and editing videos. “A standard ad production timeline can range from one to six months, including concepting, scripting, boarding, pre-production, shoot, and post,” said Lindsay Brillson, head of brand and content at Pika. “With generative video, you’re able to create a shot 15 seconds after you describe it.” Competing against popular generative video tools like Sora and Stability AI, Pika also extends the length of existing videos and adjusts canvas size and aspect ratio. Co-founded by former PhD students at Stanford University, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika's Lip Sync feature lets people synchronize recorded voices or text-to-speech generated voices with characters in the video. This feature supports up to 35 languages with text-to-speech capabilities. Brand: Brillson wouldn't share names, but early testers include gaming companies, ad agencies, news sites, and film and postproduction houses. Funding: Secured a $55 million Series A funding round in November last year, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (also an investor in Stability AI). Rembrand The problem it solves: Rembrand analyzes every frame of a video to identify opportunities for in-scene product placement on tables, shelves, or walls in a seamless manner, according to Cory Treffiletti, the company's chief marketing officer, “It enables brands to be integrated into content in a way that doesn't interrupt, and it absolutely captures attention,” he said. “So far, we have seen a four-times more efficient cost-per-second-viewed for brands when they use our model versus standard video advertising.” Brand: Pepsi, L’Oréal, Garnier, Charles Schwab, Amazon, Virgin Galactic and Lenovo, placing brand products on creator videos across YouTube and TikTok. Funding: Snagged $8 million seed round led by Greycroft and UTA Ventures in February 2023. The round also included L’Oréal’s VC fund and Good Friends, a venture fund associated with the founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s and Allbirds. The startup plans to raise a Series A funding round in 2024. TollBit The problem it solves: Co-founded by Toast alumni Olivia Joslin and Toshit Panigrahi, the Boston-based startup wants publishers and AI companies to benefit from each other Its two-sided marketplace helps publishers monetize their content and data that might otherwise be scraped by AI bots. It also provides AI companies (deploying these bots) access to contemporaneous data needed to train LLMs and algorithms and fuel a real-time data access for applications built on top of core models. “AI can consume content so quickly across the web, that you cannot humanly make all partnerships and licensing deals,” said Panigrahi. “We need a better way to give access to content and data to these AI companies.” TollBit lets publishers price their content based on factors like format or specific topics (like Taylor Swift or finance). Publishers get access to content performance. Brand: It wouldn't share names, but it works with publishers, including those with private AI licensing deals in place. Funding: Raised $7 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Sunflower Capital (seed round) in March. Other participants include AIX, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective and Liquid 2 Ventures. This funding will support TollBit's expansion plans, growing its eight-person technology team. Typeface AI The problem it solves: Typeface, launched in 2022 by Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis, helps brands create tailored and scalable content and ad campaigns at lower costs. It sits on top of AI models by Google, Microsoft and Salesforce and brands upload assets and guidelines for text and image output, maintaining brand voice. Its "personalization engine" called Blend uses AI to train a brand’s data to produce content within a brand’s style and voice, said Parasnis. Brand: Benefits firm Sequoia is a client, as well as digital-native firms and Fortune 500 retail, consumer packaged goods, beauty, financial services and automotive brands. Funding: Closed $165 million in Series B last June from Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures), Salesforce Ventures, Madrona, Menlo Ventures and M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund). Uplifted The problem it solves: Uplifted, founded in 2022, lets brands co-create AI-powered user-generated content (UGC) with their customers. People shopping with Uplifted’s brands are invited to create content and share their shopping experiences via the platform. The platform’s live video chats ask detailed follow-up questions tailored to what the users say. If someone mentions they use a product with their children, the AI follows up with a question asking them to explain how their children use the product. Its product "scene intelligence" examines videos, extracting key elements to brands, like those that highlight product benefits. “Some people love to see their face in ads while brands get access to unscripted and authentic content, which is the biggest struggle in UGC,” CMO Yoav Aziz told ADWEEK. “It’s a win for all.” Brand: Fiverr, Playtika, Mixtiles, Underoutfit, AS Beauty, Tactile Games, Superplay Funding: Raised $5,000,000 in seed funding by Tal Ventures, Ignia, Seed IL and Jibe Ventures, along with angel investors, in early 2023. Waymark The problem it solves: Founded in 2017, Waymark is a video AI platform that helps smaller advertisers create low-cost local TV commercials within minutes. Waymark’s technology uses ChatGPT to pull information from a company’s online presence, like logo, images, color palette and brand voice, to create a video ad in tandem with a company’s brand style using AI voice-over. “Quality creative is difficult,” said CEO Alex Persky-Stern. “It's expensive, time-consuming, and it's also mostly guesswork. For smaller businesses, that mostly means that they don't ever get any quality creative.” Brand: Fox TV Stations, Spectrum, Gray Television, Morgan Murphy Media Beasley Media Group and Australia’s Nine Network. Networks use the tech to create content for their advertisers. Funding: Secured $4.6 million in funding since its inception, per Crunchbase.

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12 Hot AI Startups That Brands Are Working With

For marketers, they can simplify ad creation and address AI ethical concerns like copyright

Trishla Ostwal

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