I’m thrilled to share today’s news: Textio is announcing a Series B investment round led by Stacey Bishop at Scale Venture Partners. The round includes all our prior investors at Emergence Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Upside Partnership.
So much has happened since we started Textio in October 2014!
The first time I visited a potential customer, we didn’t have a product yet. All I had with me was a Kickstarter predictor prototype that a few of us had built working side by side in a very small room.
We had built an engine to analyze every Kickstarter project ever in existence, and the engine used their outcomes to find the language patterns that led to fundraising success. If you followed the engine’s guidance, you could optimize your Kickstarter project to successfully raise money.
The prototype worked. In fact, it worked well enough that the engine was able to predict a new project’s fundraising success with >95% accuracy. It worked well enough that we raised our first investment round.
So there I was on my first potential customer visit, sitting across the table from a VP of Talent who had been introduced to me by a friend of a friend, showing her our prototype. “Imagine that this isn’t just about Kickstarter,” I told her. “Imagine that you could use this every time you write. Like if every time you wrote something, you knew exactly who would respond — and you could see how to change it to get a different response.”
“Could we use it for our job listings?” she asked. “To write them so different people would apply?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“A job listing is really different from a Kickstarter project,” she said.
“It is,” I agreed.
“But we have a lot of data about who applies to our job posts,” she continued.
“I do not doubt it,” I replied.
She went on. “If we shared that data with you, your engine could tell us why some of them do better than others.”
“Yes,” I said. “And how to fix the problematic ones so that people respond to them better.”
In those early days, people had to squint a little to see the augmented writing experience we were creating. They had to see past Kickstarter and into other kinds of writing.
The visionary leaders of talent and diversity who tried our beta and brainstormed with us became our first customers. They pushed us in all kinds of ways. They measured their results before and after Textio. They deployed Textio broadly to hiring managers. They set company policies that jobs needed to score at least a 90 in Textio before they could be published. They helped us win disruptHR.
Most of all, they spent time writing in Textio, and they expected augmented writing to provide a world-class experience. With close measurement, people saw that they could change their hiring outcomes by changing their language.
Over the last two years since that first conversation, our customers have helped grow Textio’s data set to over 250M job posts with their outcomes. Global companies like Vodafone, Atlassian, and NVIDIA are using Textio to fill roles almost 20% faster, seeing a 25% lift in the number of applicants qualified enough to interview, and 23% more women applying to technology and leadership roles.
Augmented writing isn’t just an idea or a prototype anymore
Augmented writing isn’t just an idea or a prototype anymore. It is changing the way people write. Textio started with job posts, but our customers have bigger ideas.
Not long ago, we noticed something special about some of our subscribers. We noticed that the longer they’d been using Textio to write job posts, the more other stuff they wrote in Textio too.
In fact, teams that had been using Textio for 12+ months showed something extra-special: the number of docs they wrote in Textio every month was more than the number of job posts they’d published in the month. In other words, they were using Textio to write stuff beyond just job posts.
When we asked some of them about it, they agreed. They showed us how they were trying to adapt Textio to other kinds of writing they were doing: email, landing pages, and all kinds of outbound comms.
The investment round we are announcing today lets us build on Textio’s augmented writing experience for job posts and extend it to the other important things you write every day at work. Because whatever business you’re in, whether you’re making software, houses, or hamburgers, the thing your company actually makes the most of every day is text.
From job posts to emails to website content and more, all that text is an expensive investment. If you could know ahead of time who was going to respond to anything you’d written, and you knew why, then you could change your approach to get a different result before it was too late.
Textio writers are already trying to adapt the platform to all kinds of writing. It’s time we caught up with them.
Thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey so far. We’re just getting started.