Jasper.ai

Jasper was founded in 2021, but its cofounders go back much further. 8 years ago, Dave Rogenmoser, JP Morgan and Chris Hull sat down and conceived the most wildly ambitious goal they could imagine at that point. 1. Start a company (doesn’t matter what)2. Make $6k/mo to support their families 3. Most importantly, their friendship and commitment to each other would supersede 1 and 2.After shutting down two failed SaaS companies, they finally started a digital marketing agency. Their first client was doing SEO for a porta-potty rental company for $300/mo. After a year, they pivoted and spent the next three years building a course company teaching all things marketing. Courses businesses are great for learning, but hard to scale. They decided they wanted to build a SaaS company and they wanted to go big. That meant we needed to get into YC.

The team decided to apply to Y Combinator because they wanted the foundation and acceleration to make a scaleable SaaS company happen. They initially applied with a company called Proof and were rejected because the idea was too small - more of a feature than a product. After the rejection, they kept building. They spent six months growing Proof and applied again. This time they had gone from zero to $175K in 10 months and refined their vision. The combination of vision plus traction landed them the spot in YC.“YC was amazing,” Dave Rogenmoser later recounted, “I can’t recommend it enough.” The team worked hard and kept dreaming of where the company was headed. The week after Demo Day they had raised $2.2M at a $12M cap. They moved to Austin, TX, and were on their way. Over the next two and a half years, the company worked hard on Proof, but in the fall of 2000, growth stalled and that feature-not-a-product challenge persisted. The founders made the hard decision to pivot and start anew with an AI company.

Jasper went from launch to unicorn in 18 months. It’s one of the fastest-growing startups of all time, but like many startups the journey was longer than people may think. The founders first started working together eight years before Jasper’s Series A. They knew they wanted to build something together but took a few attempts to get to a product with traction. They started a marketing agency, then a learning platform, then a personalization and social proof company before hitting upon AI. When they saw generative AI in 2020, they knew how impactful it could be. With marketing roots, they had first-hand experience with the pain that many marketers feel keeping up with content demands and creating enough testing variations to produce good insights. The idea for Jasper started as a way to create and test ad variations, but they quickly saw how impactful it could be in long-form content and expanded into the AI platform you know today. Today Jasper is an AI platform built for growing businesses. When you give Jasper a prompt, it selects from a range of language models the right starting model for your use case, then it can add context about your business, reliable source citations and more current data to improve outputs for your business. In 2022, Jasper added an extension enabling users to call upon its AI-assistance anywhere they create. In 2023, Jasper introduced a collection of major new features for business users. Jasper now has tools for SEO, generating images, checking for plagiarism, collaboration and more. It is becoming an integral part of how businesses create content that resonates with their target audiences. With its ever-growing suite of features and capabilities, Jasper continues to make content creation easier than ever before for nearly a hundred thousand businesses and growing.

For executives and content teams at growing companies, It’s impossible to keep up with content demands. The number of channels, campaigns and topics companies need to cover proliferate every year. It’s no longer enough to have a blog. You must have a blog, podcast, growing newsletter and social audiences across a half dozen different sites and communities. Every content creator knows the pain of staring at a blank page on a deadline, and this pressure leads our teams to chase word-count and produce lower quality content. Jasper helps businesses leverage generative AI to accelerate the writing process so they can give their teams more breathing room for their ideas.

Jasper is working to become the AI platform that helps the world’s businesses unlock their best ideas. We want growing companies to be able to tap AI that matches their brand voice, creates the best possible outcomes for their use cases, and can be called upon in all the places their teams create. Along the way we’re working to help businesses transform the way they operate, learn to leverage AI responsibly, and grow.