How do companies build their brands as they seek to scale? The choice is between paying for exposure or developing their own content in order to attract and engage potential customers. The second option is the preferred option for many, particularly as the cost of paid media continues to rise, but developing content can be time-consuming and requires specialist skills. Enter Scalenut, today announcing a $3.1 million funding round, which thinks it has the answer.
Scalenut is an artificial intelligence-powered platform that aims to automate large chunks of the content creation process for businesses pursuing growth through this avenue. “We want to help businesses to use content in order to scale sustainably,” says Mayank Jain, who co-founded the business in 2021, along with Gaurav Goyal and Saurabh Wadhawan, launching its first products earlier this year.
Scalenut’s platform enables content creators to build a structure for a piece of content on any given topic, based on the keywords they want to use, the existence of content on the same topic published by others and how it has performed, and leveraging publicly-available information on the topic. Once that structure is in place, Scalenut’s AI technology will develop a draft of the content, which the creator can edit and fine-tune before publishing.
The idea is to automate much of the heavy lifting of content creation. The platform does the research the creator would normally spend significant time on, identifies the type of content that performs well in a given area, and generates a first draft of the final piece of work.
“In effect, we’re giving creators more time to spend on the creative parts of generating content,” says Jain. “We’re not taking that away from them; we’re trying to free up the time they would otherwise have to spend on the more mundane elements of the task, from conducting research to building keyword lists.”
Feedback from users suggests they are saving around a third of the time they used to spend on each project, Jain says. That means they can create content more quickly – and create more content – giving businesses a means to build a larger audience at speed. “It’s a much more efficient way to pursue content as a route to scaling your business and growing your customer base,” Jain argues.
So far, Scalenut has primarily aimed its platform at freelance content creators and the writers employed by agencies that specialise in content creation. Over time, however, it expects its target customer base to expand to include medium-sized and large enterprises where content creation done in-house.
The platform is particularly well-suited to creating relatively formulaic content – listicles, product guides, product comparisons and reviews – but this is the type of content that brands need to produce in large volumes. Reducing the cost and time required for such content creation is therefore vital.
A one-stop-shop for content creation is invaluable in this regard, Jain says. “SEO and content marketing teams are juggling multiple tools for sound SEO research, content creation, optimization, and performance measurement,” he points out. “Not only is it inefficient, but it also leads to siloed team efforts based on broken insights and incomplete strategy – this is why most businesses struggle to scale content marketing successfully.”
The challenge is all the more daunting given the number of businesses publishing competing content, Scalenut argues. The pandemic saw businesses all around the world step up their digital activities – whether they were offline or online prior to the crisis – which makes for a crowded marketplace in which everyone is struggling to make themselves heard.
Scalenut founders Gaurav Goyal, Saurabh Wadhawan and Mayank Jain
Scalenut’s customer base is growing quickly. The product operates on a software-as-a-service basis, with three pricing levels’ users pay from $29 to $149 a month, depending on how much functionality they require and the volume of content they want to create. Since the launch of its first paid-for product in January, revenues have been growing at a rate of 50% month-on-month, Jain says.
Today’s fundraising should help the business to accelerate, with the cash earmarked for building out Scalenut’s technology stack, as well as for product development. The platform currently operates only in English, but other languages are on the agenda.
The funding round is led by funding round led by Saama Capital and Amit Singhal, a former senior vice president at Google who served as head of Google Search. It builds on a $400,000 seed round led by Titan Capital, First Principles VC, AngelList, Abhishek Goyal, and a number of other leading angel investors.
“With content consumption increasing worldwide, content is a key driver for business growth,” says Ash Lilani, managing partner at Saama Capital. “One common problem that businesses face to power up their organic marketing is scaling content meaningfully – there is no easy way to scale content and Scalenut is solving precisely that with its robust AI platform.”