How Jasper is making AI the future of content creation in the enterprise

Across his 27-year career in software, Sameer remembers four moments where a new technology felt magical. The first was experiencing the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for the first time with Salesforce, and seeing how quickly software could be improved and delivered to all customers. The second was seeing a VMWare demo, in which many virtual machines were spun up on one server, then seamlessly moved to another one. The third was seeing how easy it was to launch an AWS instance, rent it for pennies per hour, then watch it elastically expand and contract based on load volume (with autoscaling, for the cloud nerds out there). And the fourth was trying Jasper and discovering the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create content.

We believe the current wave of innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) will be remembered as one of the most important technological moments of our lifetimes. That decades from now, future generations will refer to this period in 2022 as a pivotal time in this field. We’ve seen the first generative AI platforms at the application layer, new large-language models accompanied by significant improvements in compute at the infra layer, and new workflows in testing, deploying, and monitoring models. Nearly 70 years of research, experimentation, model training, progress, and failure in this field have led to this moment. But in the last few months, this category has unfolded in fast-forward mode, with earth-shaking companies and products launching every few weeks. Change happens slowly, then quickly.

AI/ML represents the next leap forward in the original promise of technology: to make life easier and save humans time by automating work. With AI/ML, machines can perform some of humanity’s most core creative skills—like writing, creative design, and synthesis of large datasets. AI is silently prevalent in many systems we interact with, like social media, voice assistants, search, and payments. However, we haven’t proactively sought AI to improve the day-to-day workflows making up our life’s work. There are already millions of early tinkerers of AI-powered text generation, text-to-art, and text-to-video platforms, but we're only scratching the surface. But we have hope that AI will become embedded at a more massive scale into the day-to-day workflows of the world’s 1 billion knowledge workers.

At Bessemer, we believe AI will change human potential, and that generative AI will become as fundamental a technology in our lives as the internet, cell phones, email, and search. We believe that the Jasper team, led by Dave Rogenmoser, will be a category-defining company that brings this revolutionary technology not just to individual creators, but also to traditional enterprises of every scale. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Bessemer’s growth practice is joining the $125 million Series A of Jasper, the AI Content Platform, at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Content takes many different forms, all of which begin with a blank page and a creative spark: blog posts, Tweets, social media ads, YouTube videos, product descriptions, language translations, marketing emails, eBooks, and more. And content is generated at an explosive rate—every day, entrepreneurs, creators, and marketers generate over 2 million WordPress blog posts and 432,000 hours of YouTube video. But with any great piece of content comes friction, iteration, and many false starts. That’s where Jasper comes in. 

Jasper unlocks creativity, making generative AI accessible to businesses and individual creators. With Jasper, anyone with a laptop can break through writer’s block, repackage what they’ve written, create original images, and adapt their content to different formats and languages. The underlying AI model is powerful enough to write thousands of words based on a prompt––not just auto-completed sentences and short headlines, but full blog posts and eBooks. It can make any of us a great writer or a great artist, and it can save us hundreds of hours per year. Jasper has quickly built one of the most powerful communities of people using AI for work, going from zero to more than 70,000 paying subscribers in 19 months, ranging from freelancers to digital marketing agencies to content copywriters at the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world.

Jasper is shipping at a rapid pace. They recently released Jasper Art for creating original art in seconds. Just describe an image—the subjects in it, the mood it’s supposed to elicit, and its style—and Jasper will create four images in a matter of seconds. They’re also releasing Jasper Anywhere, a new browser extension to bring generative AI across the full range of websites and content platforms their customers use, including Google Docs, Gmail, Notion, HubSpot, Shopify, social media platforms, and content management systems, to name a few. That means content creators will be able to bring the Jasper magic to their email inboxes, marketing campaign systems, and blogging tools.

We have gotten to know Dave well over the past year, and there are many qualities that made us want to back him and this team. They're obsessed with helping customers take advantage of this new technology.  And they're equally obsessed with building a company with a great culture (and we believe that values create value). Dave is both visionary and decisive—but also humble and hungry. All traits that have led to Jasper's initial success, and we believe will prove instrumental in its continued, meteoric ascent. We’re thrilled to be going on this journey with Dave, JP, Chris, Shane, and the rest of the amazing Jasper team assembled in the past year.

Bessemer’s growth practice looks to partner with companies that will define the next century of how we live and work. Building on our generative AI roadmap, we are thrilled to back more founders changing the world.

By the way—those first three “magical” moments we mentioned above ended up spawning entire industries, generating tens of billions of revenue and trillions of market cap. We believe Dave and the entire Jasper team are building a category-defining AI company, and we couldn't be more excited to partner with them on the journey.

If you’re building in this space, we’d love to back you—please reach out to sameer@bvp.com, mdonofrio@bvp.com, byron@bvp.com, and aschmitt@bvp.com!