Many technology success stories begin not with sweeping visions or lavish funding rounds, but with a narrow, unmet need that larger players overlook. In the crowded market for artificial intelligence-powered writing tools, one small startup’s quiet pivot toward a niche audience has produced an outsized result.
Jenni.ai, an academic writing assistant founded by serial entrepreneur David Park, has grown annual recurring revenue (ARR) to more than $10 million and reached an estimated valuation of about $25 million in less than two years, according to people familiar with the company. The business achieved that scale with a team that numbered just nine people until late 2024, defying assumptions that only heavily funded, large-scale operations can win in AI.
Park’s path to that outcome was neither direct nor glamorous. He began building companies at 16, launching more than a dozen ventures over the next decade, ranging from social networking apps to cryptocurrency trading projects. All of them failed.
“I spent the last ten years failing,” Park said in an interview. “Real success only arrived in the past two years.”
After dropping out of college, Park returned to his parents’ home, living frugally and spending up to eight hours a day cold-calling prospective customers to pitch early versions of Jenni.ai. Most calls ended abruptly. “Ninety-nine percent of people hung up,” he said.
Jenni.ai’s fortunes began to shift in mid-2022, after a single social media post sent a surge of users to the platform. That moment of traction, however, coincided with a personal crisis: Park was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. As he underwent treatment, growth stalled, and he faced a decision that confronts many founders at pivotal moments—sell the business and walk away, or double down on an uncertain future.
Park chose to stay.
From that point, the company’s growth accelerated sharply. Jenni.ai’s ARR rose from about $1.8 million in 2023 to $8 million in 2024, before surpassing $10 million in early 2025, according to internal figures shared by the company. Over the same period, the team expanded to 23 employees.
Three pivots to find real demand
Jenni.ai was founded by Park and Henry Mao, a computer scientist with a background in neural networks for music and natural language generation. The two met while studying at the University of California, San Diego, where Park majored in literature.
Their first attempt at Jenni.ai targeted content agencies and search engine optimization writers, offering tools designed to speed up the production of marketing copy. The early technology, built before large language models became widely available, delivered only modest efficiency gains. Customers were price-sensitive and churn was high.
When OpenAI released GPT-3, Park and Mao shifted again, repositioning Jenni.ai as a general AI writing platform to compete with better-known startups such as Jasper and Copy.ai. That move proved costly. Lacking the capital and marketing reach of larger rivals, Jenni.ai struggled to differentiate itself, and monthly recurring revenue stalled at roughly $2,000.
Park responded by intensifying user interviews. Instead of pitching features, he asked customers why they stopped using the product and how it fit—or failed to fit—into their daily work. A pattern emerged. While marketers drifted away, a small but consistent group of users remained: students and researchers writing academic papers.
“That discovery changed everything,” Park said. “They weren’t looking for marketing creativity. They needed structure, citations and academic rigor.”
Academic writing posed a different problem set from promotional content. Users cared less about originality and more about clarity, logic and adherence to strict formatting standards. Park and Mao decided on a third pivot, eliminating most marketing-focused features and rebuilding Jenni.ai as an academic writing assistant.
The revised product centered on three functions: AI-powered autocomplete optimized for academic tone, a document library that allowed users to upload research papers and generate content grounded in those sources, and a citation system supporting more than 1,700 academic styles.
Crucially, the platform emphasized traceable citations, allowing users to link generated text back to specific passages in original documents. The feature addressed growing concerns about academic integrity and plagiarism in AI-assisted writing.
A viral moment and its consequences
User growth remained gradual until July 2022, when a tweet by technology blogger Zain Kahn listed Jenni.ai among a selection of free productivity tools. The post went viral, attracting hundreds of thousands of interactions and triggering a flood of traffic that briefly overwhelmed Jenni.ai’s servers.
Within a day, the company generated about $10,000 in subscription revenue—roughly equivalent to several months of prior income. Translations and reposts across social platforms amplified the exposure, bringing Jenni.ai its first large-scale audience.
The sudden visibility underscored both the power and the unpredictability of social media-driven growth. Park later recruited a former university classmate with experience in short-form video marketing to build a more systematic acquisition strategy on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
That effort led to what Park describes as a “short video matrix” approach. Rather than relying on established influencers with large followings, Jenni.ai partnered with creators to launch new, single-purpose accounts focused exclusively on the product. The strategy took advantage of platform algorithms that prioritize engagement over follower counts, allowing new accounts to reach large audiences at relatively low cost.
One recurring video format depicted students facing imminent paper deadlines, discovering Jenni.ai, and completing assignments rapidly using its tools. Variations on the theme accumulated billions of views across platforms, according to the company, and generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in subscription revenue.
Choosing to continue
As Jenni.ai gained traction, Park’s cancer diagnosis threatened to derail the momentum. During treatment, the company’s growth slowed, and prospective buyers expressed interest in acquiring the business.
Selling would have offered financial security after years of instability. Instead, Park chose to continue building the company. Within six months, ARR tripled from about $1 million to $3 million, and subsequent growth pushed revenue into eight figures.
The company remains privately held and has not disclosed its long-term plans. Park says the focus remains on improving the product for academic users rather than expanding broadly into consumer writing markets.
Lessons from a narrow focus
Jenni.ai’s trajectory highlights a counterpoint to prevailing narratives in the AI sector, where companies often pursue scale by addressing mass-market use cases. By narrowing its scope, the startup found customers willing to pay for features tailored precisely to their needs.
Analysts say such niche strategies may become more common as competition intensifies. “As foundational models commoditize, differentiation increasingly comes from understanding specific workflows,” said one venture investor who follows AI productivity tools.
For Park, the lesson is personal as much as strategic. “Entrepreneurship isn’t about one big bet,” he said. “It’s about staying long enough to find something that actually works.”
The story of Jenni.ai suggests that in AI, as in other industries, small teams can still build durable businesses—provided they are willing to listen closely, pivot decisively and persist through repeated setbacks.
