Jasper AI

Jasper builds generative AI software for marketers. Its platform drafts and edits copy, images and campaign assets, applies a company's brand voice and style rules, and plugs into tools such as Google Docs, Gmail, Notion, HubSpot and Shopify through a browser extension. The company was founded in January 2021 in Austin, Texas, by Dave Rogenmoser, Chris Hull and John Phillip (J.P.) Morgan. Rogenmoser, a Y Combinator alumnus, had previously co-founded the marketing software company Proof with the same partners. Jasper started by selling to individual creators and small teams and has since moved toward enterprise marketing departments.

Jasper grew without a large institutional round for its first year and a half. In October 2022 it announced a $125 million Series A led by Insight Partners at a $1.5 billion valuation. Coatue, Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, Foundation Capital, Founders Circle Capital and HubSpot Ventures participated. TechCrunch described the round as the company's first major outside financing after a bootstrapped start, and noted that the money would fund a broader push into text and image generation for marketing and content teams. The round closed about six weeks before OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, which brought a wave of competition into AI writing tools.

At the time of the raise Jasper reported more than 70,000 paying subscribers, revenue of about $45 million in 2021 and an expectation of more than $75 million in 2022. The company remains private. Leadership has changed since the round: Timothy Young now serves as chief executive, and the company says it serves more than 125,000 customers, including over 900 enterprise accounts and about a fifth of the Fortune 500. Jasper has not announced a new priced round or a revised valuation since 2022.

Jasper illustrates the timing risk in application layer AI. Its backers entered at a unicorn price in its very first priced round, less than two years after founding, on the strength of rapid revenue growth built on third party language models. Weeks later, general purpose chat assistants made basic copywriting widely available, which pushed Jasper toward enterprise workflow, brand controls and integrations as its defensible ground. Whether its 2022 investors earn a return depends on that enterprise repositioning, since no liquidity event has occurred.