News

Simplified, a marketing-focused design software looking to take on Canva, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Craft Ventures. Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, former Uber CPO Manik Gupta, Pelican Ventures Ajay Yadav (also Roomie founder), Form Capital, 8Bit Capital, Early Grey Capital, GFR Fund, MyAsia VC and others participated in the round.

Simplified is aimed directly at marketers, who are inevitably responsible for generating an enormous amount of content across a variety of channels. The platform uses machine learning to automate as much of the content creation process as possible, including copy, imagery, format and sizing, and more.

For example, a marketer could be looking to post an inspirational quote on social media. They can designate that the content is meant for social media, run a search for inspirational quotes and ask the system to automatically provide an appropriate background. From there, the user can tweak whatever they’d like, like typeface or image cropping, and instantly publish.

Simplified also features collaborative tools that let teams share work and assets across the organization, as well as integrations with stock photo and video services.

The general principle here is to take what has already become a simplified process, through products like Canva, to the next level through machine learning and GPT3.

According to founder KD Deshpande, it’s all about scale. While it may be easier than ever to create a single piece of content, there is still the matter of volume. Simplified looks to speed up the process of content creation using its machine learning automation algorithms.

This comes in the midst of a massive evolution of the design space over the past several years, with players like InVision, Figma, and Canva leading the charge in providing fresh, new design tools that meet the demands of a new generation of designers and design-oriented organizations.