PromoRepublic pulls in $1.2 M, brings AI to content creation on Facebook and Instagram

San Francisco-based Finnish startup PromoRepubliс, which runs a social media content discovery and creation software as a service, has closed a $1.2 million seed round. PromoRepubliс helps small businesses and marketers to stand out on social media with professional visual content by eliminating the need to create it.

The team of 30 employees located in the US, Finland, and Ukraine competes with companies like Canva, Stencil, Adobe Spark, Crello, and DIFM (do-it-for-me) companies like MainStreenHub, Boostability who do custom social content for SMBs.

Design SaaS’s like Canva are far from putting social media posting on autopilot as they have no content ideas and suggestions, no industry-specific templates, no automatic posting. With PromoRepublic users don’t have to create posts from scratch. The service will recommend templates for specific businesses and relevant to trending topics. Basically, the users need to make a final customization and approve content for the whole month ahead. PromoRepublic will post automatically at a right time and frequency at the price starting from $20 per month. Competing DIFM-companies charge their customers $300 per month and more.

Effectively it’s a simple way to grow a small business with social media content. – TechCrunch

Last year PromoRepublic raised 400,000 euros from private investors in Finland. The current round will be used to develop an AI system that will analyze Facebook, Instagram and Twitter content and its effectiveness, and automatically generate templates based on the best SMB posts for each business category. This means to improve PromoRepublic’s under-the-hood deep learning system of content discovery, to integrate with core partners like Hootsuite, HubSpot, Buffer, Yext and to add new features to the content intelligence tool.

Finding time and resources for digital marketing was listed as the biggest challenge small business owners will face in 2017. PromoRepublic with AI recommendation feature solves this problem with less than $80 per month.

The startup launched its content builder in 2014 and over the next years went through three accelerators in Estonia, Finland and Chile. It is currently based in San Francisco and Helsinki and is operating in US, Canada, Australia, UK and New Zealand. PromoRepublic userbase is 50,000 SMBs and marketers with over 5.5 million subscribers of their social media profiles, who have already discovered, created and published more than 2.5 million stunning visual posts.

“Our mission is to boost the creativity and quality of visual content that SMB owners post to Facebook, Instagram and other social networks with help of deep learning and AI” PromoRepublic co-founder Max Pecherskyi tells us.

“We have spoken to Facebook representatives several times — the fact that SMB’s content quality is very low is a huge pain for them and SMBs, because as a result SMB owners do not consider Facebook to be an effective channel for promoting business. Only a fraction of SMBs on Facebook actively post and use paid ad features. We are on a mission of bringing Facebook back to SMBs marketing stack with templates, automation and AI” Pecherskiy says.