It was serendipitous that simplified.ai’s founders began building their company when they did, in 2020. “We were among the handful of companies that got to play around with GPT 2 as OpenAI was still developing its models, and we were one of the few beta testers with access and used it as we built ours,” says Ajay Yadav, co-founder, noting that now the Simplified team utilizes close to 20 different LLMs to provide a complete unified platform for marketers.

“In my last company, I saw that teams that did marketing were very distributed. So you had designers, video people, copywriters, managers, and other silos. And my co-founder used to work for Facebook and had worked at Uber. So he came from more enterprise, really big companies that have all the resources in the world. But the solution still seemed sideloaded, like cobbled. And we were like, 'Okay, how do we do marketing in a seamless way?'”

So the idea was to build a very simple design tool that can get your marketing campaigns out the door as fast as possible. “And then we realized, hey, marketing is not just design, it's video, it's writing better copy. And once you have all of these things, how do you publish that to social media? And so we built Simplified as one place where teams can come together, create, collaborate, and get campaigns out faster,” says Yadav.

“Our largest customer market is the US, whereas India is where we have the most users. Other big markets are Brazil and Mexico and Indonesia and Malaysia. Essentially we’re all over the world, and since starting operations in late 2021-early 2022 (as we were still adding more capabilities and techs) we’re now signing on millions of users every year,” he adds.  

These range from individuals to SMBs to larger marketing teams. “We don’t want them to go anywhere else for any of their needs, which is why we want to be a platform for all manner of business models.”

There’s also a strong India connection, and not just because the two co-founders are originally from here, and despite them now being based in the US, wanting to be the Canva of their space. “I see a lot of new businesses coming online over here. A lot of new agencies are being formed in India, and I think over here (in the US) that doesn't happen a lot. It's like more established agencies and you don't often see a lot of new agencies. The challenge is making money out of India. It's very different with discounts and negotiating and longer sales cycles. So since we are self-serve, we make sure the pricing aligns with India a lot more than even here, and we designed the pricing keeping India in mind from day one.”