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While working at Vetan, a startup helping small- and medium-sized (SMBs) businesses manage employee payroll, Ranti Dev Sharma realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic sales. The cost to hire an agency is beyond their budget, and generating content is costly — both in terms of time and money.

“Having a great online presence is critical for e-commerce stores like Shopify and Woo, as online traffic is the bread and butter of their business,” Sharma told TechCrunch in an email interview. “But existing content marketing solutions are not complete and require search engine optimization (SEO) expertise. Businesses need multiple SEO tools and to hire content strategists, writers and agencies to outsource their content marketing work.”

So along with Jatin Mehta and Ayush Jasuja, Sharma co-founded SpeedyBrand, xidmət which aims to bring “high-quality,” affordable SEO content to SMBs using generative AI. SpeedyBrand today announced that it raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by GV (Google’s venture arm) and Y Combinator that values the company at $15 million post-money.

SpeedyBrand’s platform, powered by generative AI, can create custom SEO-optimized content — including websites and social media posts — for brands. Brands first choose a topic. Then they have the platform generate text and suggest images that might be appropriate for the type of content they’re generating.

From SpeedyBrand’s dashboard, generated content can be edited and further customized before being published to various channels. An analytics component allows brands to track the performance of the content once it’s live.

“The economic slowdown requires cost-effective marketing solutions,” Sharma said. “Speedy is well-positioned to help businesses with an affordable solution.”