To some degree, every business that has a presence on the web is in the content business — whether that’s for informing customers, finding new clients, or for SEO. That means managing the production of those texts and images, updating them, and potentially optimizing them for a search engine to index and rank. Since large language models (LLMs) are quite good at generating text, it’s no surprise (and unwelcome news for freelance copywriters) that businesses now expect their content operations tools to also generate text and images for them.
AirOps, which is announcing a $15.5 million Series A funding round today, wants to be the all-in-one platform for doing all of that, with a focus of managing and generating content at scale.
In its early days, the company had a significantly broader remit. When we first wrote about AirOps after its $7 million seed round in 2023, the team was building an LLM-based tool that allowed any business to create AI-enabled applications.
“It’s just been this process of figuring out where can the models deliver real value in the economy for real customers,” AirOps co-founder and CEO Alex Halliday told me. After launching the original product, the team talked to a lot of customers to get a better grip on the problems they were trying to solve with a platform like the early version of AirOps.
As many businesses have now realized, there are areas where you can’t yet rely on LLMs to perform to a consistent benchmark. But one area where they do well enough — for better or worse — is generating content.
“It was a little bit ironic, because when we first started working with LLMs — think content and maybe less SEO — content seemed like a solved problem with all the first kind of generation of models,” AirOps co-founder Matt Hammel said. But it’s also far too easy to get these models to create bad content that doesn’t fit a company’s brand — and the real problems start once you have to manage and update this sudden plethora of text.
That’s where AirOps comes in. It allows businesses to use virtually any popular model (and bring their own API keys to them, if they want to) to generate text and images, and it allows companies to put what it calls guardrails around this, while also keeping humans in the loop. It also focuses on streamlining the overall workflow from content generation to optimization.
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It’s no secret that the internet is quickly filling up with drab LLM-generated slop that is often incorrect. The AirOps team is aware of this and throughout the conversation, the team stressed that its focus is on quality.
“The core thing we tell customers again and again is that when working with LLMs, the quality of the content in equals the quality of the content out,” Halliday said. “We help the customers find these little nuggets or little gold mines internally that they can transform into content.”
Halliday, who previously ran product at Masterclass, also stressed that he believes educating customers is key.
To build out the product and kickstart its go-to-market operations, AirOps has now raised its Series A. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from Wing VC, Founder Collective, Xfund, and Alt Capital.