Word processors have been around for three decades with only a handful of evolutionary steps that improved their functionality. Today you can format documents beautifully, check spelling and basic grammar, and collaborate with others on writing. But we’ve never seen a text editing platform with the power to actually change the way your writing affects people, until we saw our latest investment, Textio.
Textio has created a writing experience that measures how real people will respond to your language, and delivers actionable feedback to improve it, right as you’re typing. This kind of augmented writing is a revolution in word processing software. Today we are excited to announce that Scale led Textio’s $20m Series B funding round, alongside Emergence Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Upside Partnership.
When we first saw Textio in action, we quickly grasped that it was on the forefront of a dramatic shift in the way we do business by creating a platform for augmenting all business writing. As knowledge workers, we write all the time. We draft emails, create marketing collateral, write sales pitches, the list goes on and on. Imagine the possibilities if our text editor gave us recommendations on how to improve our writing based on what would get the best response from our intended audience?
The first application of Textio’s enterprise platform focuses on the HR domain. Recruiters and hiring managers use Textio to optimize their job postings. Textio gives each document a score up to 100, and reveals the language patterns that matter to your specific audience by analyzing hundreds of millions of other job posts and hiring outcomes from around the world. Customers who use the product see a measurable change in their candidate pipelines: they attract more qualified and diverse applicants, and they reduce time to hire. Textio is the first company we have seen that is fundamentally changing how we write, and delivering quantifiable results to their customers.
We are very impressed by the team that Textio has built to execute on this promise. We met Kieran and Jensen last year and thought they were the perfect duo to take on augmented writing. Kieran is a Penn PHD in NLP, and has spent her career figuring out how to measure writing. Jensen led the design and creation of Office, Outlook and Windows at Microsoft. This power team is not only technically accomplished but they have demonstrated amazing early traction with customers. For a company with less than 30 employees, Textio counts multiple Fortune 500 companies as customers. It’s obvious the market needed a product like Textio.
We’re thrilled to partner with Textio and can’t wait to see them take over the world of business writing. Try it for yourself!
