• Georgian AI Martech startup STORI raised a USD 500K Pre-Seed round from 500 Global
• The startup specializes in brand automation, primarily in social media
• STORI’s platform also includes tools for team collaboration
• The investment will fuel STORI’s R&D to introduce new features

This February, Georgian AI-powered branding facilitation startup STORI closed a Pre-Seed round of USD 500K. The funding was provided by the California-based acceleration fund 500 Global, accompanied by several business angels.

Brand Identity Shortage

Sandro Okropiridze and his team started STORI in 2022 and launched the platform in Autumn 2023. Mr Okropiridze recalls how they were completely absorbed by product development in their previous company. As amazing as those products could turn out, they lacked exposure  and brand identity. They struggled with marketing issues and delivering the message about why their products were valuable.

Soon enough, they realized that their paying customers also found it challenging to provide branded content for their own products. Through discussions, it turned out that they didn’t create any branded content because their brands didn’t have any identity as well. The need for a solution to this problem of building excellent products that go unnoticed due to a lack of branding lingered in the back of the team’s minds, and eventually led to the rise of STORI.

AI for Lead-Generating Social Media Content

According to the startup’s number’s, 24% of marketers admit to struggling to create lead-generating content. Indeed, reaching social media’s vast audiences requires not only quality content, but also an understanding of when to post, which platforms to use, the hashtags to include, etc.

STORI tackles the issue with a proprietary AI-powered brand automation platform that facilitates the generation of a brand and/or branded content. While traditional brand book creation often requires hiring agencies and takes weeks to establish brand identity, STORI’s platform provides users with initial brand guidelines within seconds, allowing for immediate implementation and further development using either AI or manual input. This streamlines the process of creating consistent brand identities, encompassing vision, mission, values, target audience, customer personas, and tone of voice.The task of STORI’s algorithms is to analyze each post and optimize content generation for each user.

‘While many sectors are concerned about the impacts of automation, marketing is one profession where the help it offers is welcomed with open arms. At STORI, we’ve created a platform where agencies and marketing teams can deploy AI to lighten the workload without compromising the quality or consistency of their branding and content,’ Mr Okropiridze tells ITKeyMedia.

‘Aside from the short-term hype, we believe GenAI will have a long-lasting, transformative impact on Martech. STORI stood out for us as a strong combination of an ambitious founding team with the drive to build a product for the global markets, a strong product from the beginning, distinguished as #1 on Product Hunt, tackling a huge market opportunity. These are the ventures we invest in and accelerate at 500 Global in EECCA,’ Pedro Vieira, partner at 500 Global, comments.

Social Media and Beyond

As of now, STORI primarily focuses on social media content creation but is not limited to it. Mr Okropiridze shares plans to expand its capabilities to automate content creation for various brand messaging channels, including blogs, newsletters, e-commerce platforms, and all forms of brand communication that may arise.

‘While social media was our initial focus due to its high-frequency demands, our goal is to encompass all messaging channels used by brands,’ the CEO states.

STORI can boast about steady growth of 20% month-on-month. The startup reports that more than 5,000 brands in 110 countries across the world have been created on STORI, with over 60,000 social media posts published.

Enabling Team Communication

Another challenge that STORI tackles is lack of effective communication between teams, as stated by 35% of marketers, according to the startup’s numbers.

‘Marketers have to juggle multiple jobs – strategizing, copywriting, designing, analyzing, and outreach. All the while, those at larger organizations find themselves siloed, resulting in poor collaboration and inconsistent results that often undo all their hard work,’ Mr Okropiridze points out.

That’s why collaboration functions are also available on STORI. Users can form multiple teams, and invite different collaborators, teammates, or external contributors there. Users can switch between teams and workspaces. Within each team, one can have multiple brands. Members can leave comments, invite other people to the platform, into the workspace, regardless of whether this is internally within an organization or a third-party agency, social media manager or content manager with a portfolio of brands. This facilitates the work for people managing multiple brands, including marketing agencies and social media managers, who can have all their work under one dashboard and easily switch among different workspaces.

2024: More R&D, Marketing, and a Seed Round

‘There’s still so much more potential in our field of work. This funding will ensure we can continue to develop new, game-changing tools for our growing community and increase our marketing efforts’ Mr Okropiridze

More specifically, STORI plans to increase its R&D spending, which will allow for the creation of new collaborative features to enable entire teams and agencies to work together within a shared ecosystem. As an example of a new feature, the startup introduces a new functionality called Personal Brand in 2024. It caters to professionals who may be introverted or too busy with their work to focus on personal branding. Its goal is to empower individuals to build their online presence and amplify their voices, in line with STORI’s mission to help people elevate their influence.

Additionally, STORI plans to raise the Seed round in 2024. The sought amount is USD 3M for further product development and expanding the company’s customer base.