India, August ’19: Spyne, an AI-based SaaS startup that helps creative professionals such as photographers and corporations to smartly leverage their content for business growth, has raised seed funding led by Smile group and other angel investors participating.
The recent funding will be used to build deeper technology solutions to streamline and distribute massive offline content photographers have.
Launched in July 2018, Spyne is founded by Sanjay Kumar (IIT Kharagpur) and Deepti Prasad (Delhi School of Economics). “Our vision is to build a single platform for creative professionals, businesses and consumers across the globe to achieve their creative goals in the most effective manner. The digital photography industry is worth nearly $110B, with millions of photographers working as freelancers on various photography assignments, producing billions of images/videos every day. There is a huge scope of innovation in the ways how content is stored, edited and distributed to clients and social media platforms presently.” says Sanjay.
The team is already working on a full spectrum of features – Face detection, auto-tagging of millions of photos with relevant text to make them crawled by Google; and AI-based Photo & Video editing solution to reduce the edit time of projects from days to minutes.
“The world speaks the language of visuals. Instagram’s growth is the biggest example. On one hand, you have creative professionals that require intuitive solutions to become more productive. At the other, you have businesses that need plenty of high-quality content to drive conversions.” says Deepti.
She further adds “Let’s just take photographers as an example. Most of them still use DVDs and USBs to share their content with customers. Some have moved onto cloud-based solutions. But, can the photographers deliver personalized experiences to the people viewing the content? Can an AI solution understand the photographer’s subjective enhancements on the images and replicate the same over the photographer’s next batch of images? Spyne is exploring this route.”
The company is already on a high growth path. It has signed up more than 700 photographers in the last 10 months of launch and is looking to scale till 3000+ by the year-end. Spyne platform has enabled the photographers to share 10M+ images with their clients, generating 5000+ favorable reviews for photographers, unprecedented in the domain.
Spyne management team comes with a vast product, technology & marketing experience. Before launching Spyne, Sanjay Kumar, Co-Founder, and CEO was leading the large Product and Technology teams at Oyo, Amazon, Yatra, and Fashionandyou. He has over 12 years of experience in building and scaling technology products to billions of users on a global scale. Deepti Prasad, the Co-Founder, comes with 10+ years of consulting experience and is the person behind content marketing and digital branding. Raunak Panpalia, who heads product, brings a rich 9+ years of experience in building enterprise products. Vivek Vishnoi leads the sales & operations team, which is responsible for high profile corporate partnerships.
