AI speechwriting startup Commencement.ai has raised a $12 million Series A led by General Catalyst, the company confirmed to techcrunch.com on Tuesday, valuing the two-year-old firm at $55 million.
The round closed after a rapid three-week process that began when co-founder and CEO Maya Patel cold-emailed General Catalyst partner Niko Bonatsos with a demo video showing the platform generating a 1,500-word graduation address in under 90 seconds. Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners joined as new investors, while seed backers Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund re-upped. Patel told techcrunch.com the fresh capital will triple the 14-person engineering team and expand the dataset beyond the current 50,000 commencement speeches scraped from university archives since 1980.
The financing arrives as generative-text tools race to own vertical use cases. Jasper’s $125 million raise at a $1.5 billion valuation last October targeted marketing copy, while Regie.ai’s $10 million Series A in March focused on sales emails. Commencement.ai’s narrower niche—ceremonial oratory—has already attracted 400 paying institutions, including Arizona State University and the University of Edinburgh, each paying $2,500 annually for unlimited speeches, according to the company. The deal also lands amid heightened scrutiny of AI training data; the Authors Guild filed a class-action suit against OpenAI last month over copyrighted books, a precedent universities may watch closely.
Patel said the startup will launch multilingual support for Spanish and Mandarin by December and begin piloting real-time teleprompter integration with graduation-stage AV vendors in Q1 2025. General Catalyst’s Bonatsos told techcrunch.com the firm expects Commencement.ai to reach 1,000 institutional customers and $5 million annual recurring revenue within 12 months, metrics that would position it for a Series B at “a step-up multiple.”