As founder of Theranest, Therapy Brands and Zertis Technologies, Shegun Otulana firmly established himself as one of Birmingham’s most successful entrepreneurs.
With his new venture, Harmony Venture Labs or HVL, Otulana is looking to support Birmingham founders and continue to elevate the local entrepreneurial scene.
HVL, which Otulana launched last year, will include a venture studio, advisory and investment elements.
The venture studio aspect will involve taking ideas from scratch and transforming them into businesses. The advisory portion will create training pipelines, protocols and programs for founders. The investment side will seek to acquire companies, accelerate their growth and base them in Birmingham.
Otulana, who stepped down as CEO of Therapy Brands in 2020, said his own experiences as a founder inspired HVL.
“I’ve seen very smart people start companies here in Birmingham, and we all seem to make the same mistakes around product development, around market validation, around product validation, around finding product market fit (and) around building teams,” Otulana said. “And the challenge we have here is if you go to cities with very dense startup cultures, people learn from each other all the time. They’ve had multiple experiences building startups, so you can reduce the number of mistakes you make building a company. You can get to scale faster because of that knowledge. We can build that here.”
One of HVL’s recent deals involves Copysmith, which uses artificial intelligence for creative content generation.
The company raised $10 million through a partnership with HVL and funds advised by growth equity firm PSG.
Copysmith was founded in Canada in October 2020 by sisters Jasmine and Anna Wang, who both have backgrounds in artificial intelligence.
With Copysmith, the founders got on Otulana’s radar, in part, because of their role in the AI space.
Otulana, who stepped into the CEO role at Copysmith as a late-stage cofounder, feels products built on AI models and not the underlying engines will become more of a focus of future startups and businesses.
“I believe that the infrastructure will end up getting dominated by a few players, and then we will build on top of it. So, if you think AWS and Google Cloud…they became dominant from a web infrastructure standpoint. I believe there will be certain players that will become dominant from an AI infrastructure standpoint,” he said. “So, when Copysmith came on my radar. I was really intrigued by the product it was building around that ecosystem on that infrastructure.”
Otulana feels Copysmith’s technology, with its text-generation AI model and in-house proprietary language models, can create digital ads, product descriptions and SEO metatags for users, therefore having a big impact in the world of marketing and content creation.
“If you just think across the board (in) the world of marketing, the primary work is around content creation. My belief is that AI is going to help us augment humans significantly around that job,” he said. “Copysmith, for me, is an ideal vehicle to build a product that makes that possible, where we can deliver the content you need, where you need it.”
Copysmith will continue to have a presence in Canada, but Birmingham will be its headquarters. The company is also looking for talent in the Magic City.
The company has around 10 full-time employees.
From HVL’s standpoint, the future involves building out the companies it has invested in with new hires, to search for new potential investments and to build out its advisory program.
