Textio Ushers In the Era of Augmented Writing; Secures $20 Million in Financing Led by Scale Venture Partners

SEATTLE, June 21, 2017 -- Textio, the developer of the world’s first augmented writing platform, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B investment round led by Scale Venture Partners. Stacey Bishop, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, will join Textio’s Board of Directors. Scale’s investment portfolio includes Box, DocuSign, HubSpot, and Omniture. This round also adds new funding from prior investors Bloomberg Beta, Cowboy Ventures, Emergence Capital, and Upside Partnership.

Textio is the first platform that makes a verifiable quantitative promise about improving the performance of writing. Fueled by an enormous proprietary data set, Textio predicts how different people will respond to written content, and shows writers exactly why, so that they can make performance improvements before a document is ever published.

“The Textio platform is unlike any other enterprise technology we have seen,” says Bishop. “There is a lot of buzz out there about AI and machine learning, but Textio customers are actually seeing empirical results that hit their bottom line. It’s no surprise that enterprise adoption of Textio grew tremendously in the last year.”

The company’s first application on the platform is used for writing more effective job postings. Textio analyzes hiring outcomes data from more than 250 million real-world job posts to score a job listing and give actionable feedback in real time. Typically, customers using Textio attract 25% more candidates qualified enough to interview, and get 23% more applications from women, and they fill roles two weeks faster than they did before using Textio.

“The era of augmented writing is just beginning,” said Kieran Snyder, co-founder and CEO of Textio. “Already our customers use Textio for more than just job listings. They are editing marketing content, sales pitches, and much more. With this new infusion of capital, combined with the rapid growth in platform adoption that we’re seeing, we’ll be able to train Textio’s predictive engine on all different forms of business writing.”

In addition to new financing, Textio is unveiling major updates to its platform, including a redesigned user interface, deeper data guidance within the platform, expanded guidance for specific job types, and single sign-on functionality for enterprise customers. In less than a year of focusing on enterprise sales, Textio already has annual subscriptions from many Fortune 500 companies, among them Johnson & Johnson and Cisco.

In 2017, Textio quickly garnered widespread industry recognition and won two major startup competitions: DisruptHR at HR Tech World in London and the iTalent competition at the HRO Today Forum in Chicago. Kieran Snyder was selected as a finalist for CEO of the year by GeekWire.

“When tackling a new market such as augmented writing, it is rare to see two people as experienced as Kieran Snyder and Jensen Harris,” adds Bishop. “The co-founders have leveraged their backgrounds and vision to build a company with a proven track record of rapid growth, putting Textio in the position of a clear industry disruptor."

About Textio
Founded in Seattle in 2014 by Kieran Snyder and Jensen Harris, Textio (@textio) is an augmented writing platform that predicts the performance of business documents as they are being written and guides authors to improve the effectiveness of their writing in real time. Textio Talent, the first platform application, improves the language in job listings to speed up the time to fill a position by 20% on average. In a short time, Textio has been widely adopted by enterprises looking to fill roles more quickly with more qualified and more diverse candidates. In total, the company has raised $29.5 million in funding from Scale Venture Partners, Emergence Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Upside Partnership.

About Scale Venture Partners
Scale Venture Partners (@scalevp) invests in software companies that are transforming the future of business. Investments include: Box (BOX), Chef, Cloudhealth, DataStax, Demandbase, DocuSign, ExactTarget (ET), HubSpot (HUBS), JFrog, Lever, and WalkMe. Scale partners with entrepreneurs to support accelerated growth from the first customer to market leadership. Founded in 2000, Scale has 1B under management and is located in Silicon Valley. For more information visit www.scalevp.com.

Contact: 
Marissa Coughlin
Email: [email protected]