A Northern Kentucky transplant and former Allos Ventures investor is launching a startup to automate the marketing and social media content creation process – using artificial intelligence.
Paul Ehlinger said the company, called Flamel.ai, is a first of its kind, fully AI-driven design studio for influencer marketing content. The startup, launched this fall, is already attracting investment interest, including from his former employer, he told me.
Flamel (pronounced Flah-MEL, a nod to the Harry Potter character and real-life alchemist, Nicholas Flamel) is both a passion project and one born out of personal necessity, he said.
Ehlinger joined Allos, an Indianapolis-based venture capital firm with heavy Cincinnati ties, in December 2019, before leaving shortly after to co-launch Sixty8 Capital, an Allos sister organization that aims to provide seed-stage funding for Black, women and LGBT founders, with managing director Kelli Jones.
At Allos and Sixty8, and even at Columbus-based Gifthealth, an Allos portfolio company where Ehlinger served as director of operations, he ended up personally handling marketing efforts or managing the company’s marketing teams.
Putting out consistent content often proved a time-consuming struggle, he said. Flamel will make that process “super-efficient, super quick and easier.”
In a few clicks, and based on a typed description, the platform will allow users to create a Facebook or Instagram post, and later, radio ads or TikTok videos (the latter, Ehlinger said, being the hardest technical lift).
Unlike existing tools, such as Canva, no templates are needed. Users don’t need to have an eye for design or advertising. Flamel generates the text and image at the same time, creating an original image pixel-by-pixel using latent diffusion models.
“For the last several years, I’ve been following all the latest artificial intelligence advancements, and I just had this “a-ha” moment where I was like, ‘You could absolutely automate the creation of a lot of this marketing and advertising content using these new tools and technologies,” Ehlinger said.
The company was officially incorporated in September, although Ehlinger has only been actively working on the project for two months. So far, Flamel is a team of two: his technical co-founder, Derek Whitley, is based in Bloomington, Ind.
Flamel plans to launch its MVP, or minimum viable product, which is used to test its initial idea, in the coming weeks. "I'm a big fan of moving as fast as possible and seeing what we can break early," he said.
A pre-seed round, which includes Allos as a participating investor, is also pending.
The company doesn’t have a physical office space but will likely consider opening one as it staffs up. Ehlinger, who is based in Covington, said he’s looked informally at a few spots on both sides of the river. The goal is to hire somewhere between eight to 12 people between now and late 2023.
The initial customer base is broad. Flamel will go to market initially as a SMB, or small- to medium-sized business, play. “If you're a small business, you probably have one, or maybe nobody on your team that's officially in charge of marketing," he said.
There is room, he added, to expand the feature set into an enterprise-wide situation.
“Every company is building digital content. The sales pitch is, ‘would you like to do that faster and easier?’” Ehlinger said. "The value’s immediate."
Long term, outside of just product or company-based advertising, Flamel wants to build out an influencer advertising model: with the ability to auto generate a celebrity influencer or professional athlete into an ad. The whole ideology behind alchemy – and the company's name – is turning a "normal material into gold via magic."
“We say it's magic, because it kind of is. It feels like that when you’re using it," Ehlinger said. "We're looking to take a very standard thing and turning it into a piece of advertising gold."
