Tailor Brands, an artificial intelligence startup that creates logos and develops brands for businesses, has raised a $15.5 million Series B round of funding, bringing its total financing amount to $20.6 million, according to a news release.
The company, which has offices in New York and Tel Aviv, plans to use the money to make its service available in new languages (it’s currently available in English, Spanish, and German), to make new hires, and to add other undisclosed branding tools. Founded in 2014, Tailor Brands says it had more than 3.4 million businesses as users in 2017, and projects 12 million for 2018.
The service can make a logo simply and quickly by analyzing users’ answers to a few simple questions and visual tests. The company’s website provides a user numerous pairs of fonts, and the user must click on whichever one he or she prefers. That, and a few descriptions about what the business does, helps the A.I. system develop the logo and brand, Tailor Brands says.
I decided to give the system a try, without alerting the company first. In less than 10 minutes, the A.I. system created logos for two fictional brands for me: a food truck called “Nacho Nacho, My Nacho” and a hair-dye business I called “Bob Marmalade.”
To test its machine learning capability, and whether it would provide unique logos for each business, I selected the same fonts as my preference for both brands. The company also asks for a description of your business, which it says helps the system build a better design. I told the system that the food truck lets customers build custom nacho plates from a variety of toppings, while “Bob Marmalade” only sells orange hair dye. (You can find out what the logos look like below.)
Because I hadn’t created a user account, Tailor Brands only showed me a shaded preview of three versions of each of the logos. More choices are available if you do sign up (which is presumably where their high user numbers come from). You only get access to the license for the design, and the ability download it, if you pay for a subscription to Tailor Brand’s services. The price is $2.99 per month for a basic logo plan, which tries to attract subscription users by providing seasonal logos, brand development help, and analytics. It’s $10.99 monthly for more advanced options, such as logo redesign tools and Facebook ads. Users keep the rights to their logos, which they can download from the company, even if they cancel, according to the Tailor Brands website.
In addition to creating the logos, the company says it is also working to train its algorithms to write advertising copy and develop a social media presence for customers.
A.I. is a heavily hyped and saturated sector, drawing more than $10.8 billion in venture capital investment in 2017, according to PitchBook. Some applications of the technology are clearly more advanced than Tailor Brand’s logo service, such as Seattle-based Xnor.ai’s device-enhancing A.I. technology. But both companies are drawing in millions of investment dollars.
Xnor.ai is developing a technology it says will boost the capabilities of basic machines—such as cameras, sensors, watches, and more—to be able to perform the work of A.I. and machine learning tools. Xnor.ai announced a $12 million Series A funding round yesterday.
Tailor Brands’ new round of funding was led by Pitango Venture Capital Growth Fund and British Armat Group. Earlier investors Disruptive Technologies and Mangrove Capital Partners also participated.
As for the look of the logos for the two fake businesses Tailor Brands made for me—and again, these were only previews—the designs were definitely different, though not incredibly complex. And they didn’t necessarily seem to reflect the business model—Bob Marmalade’s “icon-focused” design shows an object resembling a Hoberman sphere above a reasonably orange logo (see the preview below).
And Nacho Nacho, My Nacho’s “name-based” logo is reminiscent of a low-budget title’s font—though, maybe the dripping letters are a reference to melted cheese?
