Textio Inc., a Seattle-based startup that uses machine learning to provide “augmented writing” for companies advertising for new staff, has raised $20 million in a new funding round.

The Series B round was led by Scale Venture Partners and included previous investors Emergence Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Upside Partnership.

Founded in 2014, Textio’s “advanced machine learning platform for writing” uses a predictive engine that analyzes job listings and hiring outcomes data from over 50 million documents to “find the meaningful language patterns that cause some job posts to succeed where others fail.” Put more simply, it writes job ads using language that it claims is more successful at getting good applicants.

The idea behind the company may seem somewhat mundane, given that you might be able to train 50 monkeys to write a decent job ad. But where the company gets interesting is with its application of artificial intelligence. Textio claims its machine learning platform tweaks language in a job ad using an “innovative learning loop that gets smarter with every keystroke.”

The company claims that users on average recruit 25 percent more people qualified enough to interview and 23 percent more women 17 percent faster, whatever that means. While it’s easy to be facetious about the company and its marketing claims (perhaps generated by its AI algorithms), serious companies appear to like it with users including Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Slack Inc., Atlassian Inc., VMware Inc., Bloomberg L.P. and a range of other firms.

“One of the reasons that we have a point of view about augmented writing and not automated writing, is that you can’t actually take the personal human voice and point of view out of the equation and still expect writing to land with real people,” co-founder Keiran Snyder told Geekwire. “If every job post sounded exactly the same, none would perform any better or worse than others.”

Including the new round, Textio has raised $29.5 million to date. The company said it would use the new funding to expand into other types of business interactions such as recruiting emails and sales communications.

Image: Textio