Search company, investor...

Predict your next investment

Angel Investor (Individual)

Investments

9

Portfolio Exits

3

About Rob May

Headquarters Location

Are you an investor?
Submit your portfolio details now to be considered in our investor rankings.

Latest Rob May News

Nova is building guardrails for generative AI content to protect brand integrity

May 5, 2023

- Advertisement - As brands incorporate generative AI into their creative workflows to generate new content associated with the company, they need to tread carefully to be sure that the new material adheres to the company’s style and brand guidelines. Nova is an early-stage startup building a suite of generative AI tools designed to protect brand integrity, and today, the company is announcing two new products to help brands police AI-generated content: BrandGuard and BrandGPT. With BrandGuard, you ingest your company’s brand guidelines and style guide, and with a series of models Nova has created, it can check the content against those rules to make sure it’s in compliance, while BrandGPT lets you ask questions about the brand’s content rules in ChatGPT style. Rob May, founder and CEO at the company, who previously founded Backupify, a cloud backup startup that was acquired by Datto back in 2014, recognized that companies wanted to start taking advantage of generative AI technology to create content faster, but they still worried about maintaining brand integrity, so he came up with the idea of building a guard rail system to protect the brand from generative AI mishaps. “We heard from multiple CMOs who were worried about ‘how do I know this AI-generated content is on brand?’ So we built this architecture that we’re launching called BrandGuard, which is a really interesting series of models, along with BrandGPT, which acts as an interface on top of the models,” May told TechCrunch. BrandGuard is like the back end for this brand protection system. Nova built five models that look for things that might seem out of whack. They run checks for brand safety, quality checking, whether it’s on brand, whether it adheres to style and whether it’s on campaign. Then it assigns each piece with a content score, and each company can decide what the threshold is for calling in a human to check the content before publishing. “When you have generative AI creating stuff, you can now score it on a continuum. And then you can set thresholds, and if something’s below, say 85% on brand, you can have the system flag it so that a human can take a look at it,” he said. Companies can decide whatever threshold they’re comfortable with. BrandGPT is designed for working with third parties like an agency or a contractor, who can ask questions about the company’s brand guidelines to make sure they are complying with them, May said. “We’re launching BrandGPT, which is meant to be the interface to all this brand-related security stuff that we’re doing, and as people interact with brands, they can access the style guides and better understand the brand, whether they’re a part of the company or not. These two products are available in public beta starting today. The company launched last year and has raised $2.4 million from Bee Partners, Fyrfly Ventures and Argon Ventures.

Rob May Investments

9 Investments

Rob May has made 9 investments. Their latest investment was in proton.ai as part of their Series A on January 1, 2022.

CBI Logo

Rob May Investments Activity

investments chart

Date

Round

Company

Amount

New?

Co-Investors

Sources

1/18/2022

Series A

proton.ai

$20M

Yes

14

2/24/2020

Seed VC

Subscribe to see more

$99M

Subscribe to see more

10

8/28/2019

Angel

Subscribe to see more

$99M

Subscribe to see more

10

6/20/2018

Seed VC

Subscribe to see more

$99M

Subscribe to see more

10

5/1/2018

Seed VC - III

Subscribe to see more

$99M

Subscribe to see more

10

Date

1/18/2022

2/24/2020

8/28/2019

6/20/2018

5/1/2018

Round

Series A

Seed VC

Angel

Seed VC

Seed VC - III

Company

proton.ai

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Amount

$20M

$99M

$99M

$99M

$99M

New?

Yes

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Co-Investors

Sources

14

10

10

10

10

Rob May Portfolio Exits

3 Portfolio Exits

Rob May has 3 portfolio exits. Their latest portfolio exit was Netra on June 16, 2023.

Date

Exit

Companies

Valuation
Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.

Acquirer

Sources

6/16/2023

Acquired

$99M

1

4/15/2021

Acquired

Subscribe to see more

$99M

Subscribe to see more

10

8/21/2019

Acquired

Subscribe to see more

$99M

Subscribe to see more

10

Date

6/16/2023

4/15/2021

8/21/2019

Exit

Acquired

Acquired

Acquired

Companies

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Valuation

$99M

$99M

$99M

Acquirer

Subscribe to see more

Subscribe to see more

Sources

1

10

10

Loading...

CBI websites generally use certain cookies to enable better interactions with our sites and services. Use of these cookies, which may be stored on your device, permits us to improve and customize your experience. You can read more about your cookie choices at our privacy policy here. By continuing to use this site you are consenting to these choices.