{"id":127364,"date":"2025-11-11T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T11:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/127364\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T11:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T11:00:10","slug":"airops-raises-40-million-series-b-at-225-million-valuation-to-rethink-marketing-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/127364\/","title":{"rendered":"AirOps raises $40 million Series B at $225 million valuation to rethink marketing in the age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

For marketers, search engine optimizers, and yes, lowly journalists, the sky is falling down. All conventional wisdom on how to win traffic from Google<\/a> is crumbling, with the new black box of chatbots emerging in its stead. And while there are plenty of tools that can tell you how badly you\u2019re performing in ChatGPT or Anthropic searches, there are few options that give concrete feedback on how to improve\u2014and hopefully survive to write content for another day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The New York and San Francisco-based startup AirOps is hoping to change that, and it has a brand-new $225 million valuation, with $40 million in funding led by Greylock, to bring marketers into the promised new land of AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe shift in discovery and consideration from traditional search to LLMs is a hair-on-fire problem for CMOs,\u201d Greylock partner Mike Duboe said in an email. \u201cThe entire marketing industry is having to re-learn how to influence organic growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

AirOps CEO Alex Halliday founded the company in early 2022 after leading product at other fast-growing startups like Teespring and MasterClass. This was nearly a year before the public launch of ChatGPT, and AirOps did not initially have an AI focus, instead helping non-technical employees at companies get access to data. As large language models became more readily available and they began incorporating AI into the product, AirOps realized that marketers were becoming their key users, using the data to either create or refresh content for their companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

AirOps\u2019 core product allows marketers to analyze and track all of the public information associated with their companies\u2014whether on blog posts, customer testimonials, or even Reddit posts and news articles\u2014and figure out how to keep it fresh. It\u2019s used by the likes of Monday.com, Webflow, and Ramp. The workflow itself resembles the kind of esoteric tools of SaaS offerings that should probably require an advanced degree, and I won\u2019t try to describe in great detail, but the real takeaway is the changing role of marketers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to Halliday, the pillar of driving growth in the era of SEO was recycling, or repackaging content that already existed on the web. Now, he says that AI agents starve for novel data or opinions that haven\u2019t already been published. That means that marketers can\u2019t rely on the same, tired listicles or tired bullet-point articles of days gone by, but instead need to generate original ideas\u2014a much more energy-intensive task that, optimistically, makes their roles not only more valuable, but more interesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We seem to be walking a tight-rope. On either side is peril\u2014AI-generated slop, and the death of media as we know it, with LLMs swallowing any last dollars of Web 2.0. But Halliday insists that we\u2019re entering a \u201cgolden age of quality content,\u201d where AI agents reward brands (and publications like Fortune) that put out the best quality information. His company, rather than helping marketers press a single button and receive enough terrible content to last a lifetime, is aimed at helping them \u201cadd to the conversation\u201d by creating unique content in a data-rich way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was heartened to hear that in this new future, it\u2019s even more important for companies to get their ideas placed in outlets like Fortune (It\u2019s probably why my pitch count only seems to increase every week.) And while the business model for marketers is uncertain\u2014will chatbots reliably direct readers to their websites and products?\u2014it\u2019s even murkier for news outlets, which theoretically have never held as much domain authority.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If anyone has an idea of how to create the AirOps for media, I\u2019m all ears. And on that note, I\u2019m headed out on paternity leave through the end of the year. I hope you\u2019ve figured it all out by the time I get back.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Leo Schwartz
X:\u00a0@leomschwartz<\/a>
Email:\u00a0leo.schwartz@fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today\u2019s newsletter. Subscribe here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

VENTURE DEALS<\/p>\n

– Fastbreak AI<\/a>, a Charlotte, N.C.-based AI-powered sports operations software company, raised $40 million in Series A funding from Greycroft, GTMfund, and others.<\/p>\n

– Onchilles Pharma<\/a>, a San Diego, Calif.-based developer of cytotoxic therapeutics, raised $25 million in Series A1 funding from Invivium Capital, Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, and others.<\/p>\n

– Terranova<\/a>, a San Francisco-based developer of terraforming robotics, raised $7 million in seed funding. Outlander and Congruent Ventures led the round and was joined by GoAhead Ventures, Gothams, and Ponderosa.<\/p>\n

– Avallon<\/a>, a New York City-based developer of agentic AI technology designed to automate insurance claims tasks, raised $4.6 million in seed funding. Frontline Ventures led the round and was joined by Y Combinator, 1984, and others.<\/p>\n

PRIVATE EQUITY<\/p>\n

– Hexaware, backed by Private Equity, acquired CyberSolve<\/a>, a Sterling, Va.-based identity and access management solutions company. Financial terms were not disclosed.<\/p>\n

This is the web version of Term Sheet, a daily newsletter on the biggest deals and dealmakers in venture capital and private equity. Sign up<\/a> for free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For marketers, search engine optimizers, and yes, lowly journalists, the sky is falling down. All conventional wisdom on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[114,293,85,46,3238,9214,997],"class_list":{"0":"post-127364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-private-equity","13":"tag-term-sheet","14":"tag-venture-capital"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}