A London-based startup behind an AI writing product aspiring to be an antidote to AI slop, co-founded by an ex-DeepMind creative lead, has emerged from stealth with a $13m seed funding round. Called Marker, the funding round was led by Index Ventures with participation from LocalGlobe.
Angel investors include Steve Newman, the co-founder of Writely, acquired by Google which became Google Docs, Cal Henderson, CTO and co-founder of Slack, and HuggingFace’s Thomas Wolf. Marker is billing itself as a “reimagined word processor”, which is built to support writers, leveraging AI tools that write with the writer, not for the writer. It says it’s designed for the process of writing- such as the rough drafts and the half-formed thoughts.
Some of its key features include ideation (helping writers figure out what they want to write), writing tools (designed to help users write and keep them in the flow), revision (supporting writers while they work through revision) and collaboration (writers can add a co-writer or commenter).
It comes amid heightened concern about AI slop. Earlier this year, Victor Riparbelli, the CEO of London AI startup Synthesia, warned against “AI-sloppification” after an increase in documents written by large language models.
