By Anshika Mathews · AIM Media House
When Alex Halliday founded AirOps in early 2022, the startup world was still clamoring for tools that could squeeze a little more efficiency out of Google’s search algorithm. SEO was a game of keywords and backlinks, and marketers largely played along. Then ChatGPT arrived.
While most founders were behind “How do we crank out more content?", they had a slightly different experience. Eighteen months before organic traffic charts started collapsing across the industry, Halliday and his team watched something strange unfold inside their own product.
They had launched a basic research workflow in just three or four steps meant to help marketers gather insights.
Instead, customers dragged it into dozens of steps, turning it into what Halliday describes as a “high-taste, high-specificity workflow.” Marketers were using AirOps as a canvas for ideas they already had but couldn’t previously operationalize. “That was the unlock,” Halliday said.
“Marketers already knew what they wanted and had big ideas; they just didn’t have a canvas to express those ideas or the data to power them.” The company shifted quickly.
Instead of guessing what the killer AI use case would be, AirOps started building infrastructure that let customers define their own workflows on what the team now calls content engineering .
As Halliday put it, the job became to provide data, building blocks, and orchestration, and “then get out of the way.” Teams at Ramp, Carta, LegalZoom, Monday.com and Webflow began using AirOps not only to write content but to reformat and update it for both humans and LLMs simultaneously.
Halliday recalls the shift clearly: “People wanted something that read beautifully for a person and was incredibly legible to an LLM.” AIM Media House spoke exclusively with the founders of AirOps to unpack their funding milestone and the story behind it.
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