We are publishing an interview of Mr. Udaykumar Kadirvel, CEO & Co-Founder, Mobigraph Inc.
Please tell us about the founders
We are 4 Co- founders Uday Kadirvel (CEO), Siddhartha Vinnakote (CTO), Subrahmanyam A S (Product head) & Sujith Kumar C R (Biz Dev & Partnerships) who are Ex-Samsung and this team has done an immense contribution in graphics and mobile systems with the company that is a market leader in smartphones.
Other founding members are Govind Malehithlu (COO & Head of BizDev), Rakesh Nanda (Creative Director) and Palanikumar Thangapandian (Cloud Architect) had immense contribution and passion towards our journey so far.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
We saw conversations were highly textual and emotionally bankrupt. Existing static emojis and stickers aren’t enough to deliver the real emotional value in digital conversations. In real conversations, your personality, body language, more importantly facial expressions and the word you speak, all these blend together to deliver the emotional value. We solved this problem by creating a new avatar tech. with hyper personalized emotions with Avatars, Animations and Visual effects. Thus, XPRESSO was designed with the purpose of “Personalized Expressions” , to make the conversations much more Personal, Expressive and Playful.
Here’s and article by BBC suggesting emojis are the language of the future: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151012-will-emoji-become-a-new-language
What is the uniqueness about your Startup?
Our tech XPRESSO magically creates highly expressive animations, by blending visual elements like avatars, facial expressions, gestures, text animations, rich visual effects to reflect the right emotional state of the user. The animations can be rendered in any desirable video formats.
Currently for XPRESSO app, we are rendering these animations as GIFs that are sharable across any platforms like Messengers, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc.
Our innovation is powered by cloud APIs and can be integrated to any other app/products that needs emotional bonding and engagement with its users.
What is the revenue model? What is the logic behind it? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ? Explain your thought process.
Our main revenue stream would be through non-intrusive ad placement. Our emotional content gives a great opportunity for brands to connect emotionally with its users. We are also looking at partnerships with Brands, Sports franchisee, Celebrities, Social messaging apps, Bots & Augmented/ Virtual reality companies.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting? How is this going to affect them?
For XPRESSO App, we are targeting Millennials and Gen Z who want to express themselves on social platform.
For our B2B business of offering XPRESSO Technology as a service, we are targeting:-
1. Chat/ Social apps :
:: To provide a high degree of emotional conversation
2. Ad Agencies:
:: Refreshing & Engaging Content
:: Run-time changeable ad format
:: Brand Mascot as part of user life
3. Keypad/OEM:
:: User created GIF (Personalised GIF)
:: Personalised experience
:: For OEM’s, XPRESSO SDK can be integrated onto any mobile platform
4. AR/VR:
:: Because of full 3D content, our tech is a very good candidate for AR cases.
5. Chat Bots:
:: Brings personality to bots.
What is the big picture of your startup? Will it lead to something bigger? If so, how?
XPRESSO is the best platform for self expression. It brings people closer & makes them smile more often. Currently XPRESSO Technology is offered as an iOS & Android app. We are getting really good traction & usage. XPRESSO Cloud API brings the same value to partners & their users.
Content is the central part of Xpresso Self Expression Platform. Currently content is being produced using our content production tool by selected art studios & indie artists. We envision to release the Xpresso content creation tool as a freeware for all artists. Once artists create the content, we will moderate & provide a market place to sell them to the end consumers. This is proven & highly rewarding business model for artists. Further the same tool could be used by media/Ad agencies to create the next generation Ads.
Xpresso eco-system is an end to end expression platform covering Creation, Deployment & Consumption. It’s going to be an awesome experience for our users and partners alike.
What is the success story of your startup in your own words?
Getting the emotional experience right on the mobile device was difficult. The emotions are to be delivered instantly without any delay. To do that we ended up creating a new 3d engine for delivering fast and smooth experience, with almost negligible overhead on battery and data usage.
The second problem was how can we scale the 3D production that comes with high cost and time. As we created more content, we understood without a production system it is extremely hard to create emotions and scale the production. Thus we created a 3D production pipeline which was challenging and time-consuming.
The third challenge for us was to grow fast and big in a short amount of time. Analytics helped us a lot in improving our app performance and the user experience. We also took quick actions on the user feedback and brought in more new and engaging features that helped us grow quickly. Our current figures of around 100K MAU & roughly 12million+ user personalized Gifs impressions/month speaks a lot about our success.
Any other information about your startup that you would like to share with us.
You can try XPRESSO apps:
Google Playstore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobigraph.xpresso&hl=en
Apple Appstore: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/app/xpresso-3d-anime-avatar-maker-animated-stickers/id1166463415?mt=8
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Thanks Udaykumar. Best of luck!