Gurgaon-based Photo Sharing Platform Spyne Raises Pre-series Funding

Spyne, an AI-driven Indian tech company that helps Online businesses with all kinds of photoshoots and photographers to leverage their visual content for business growth, has successfully raised an undisclosed amount as growth capital in their Pre-series funding.

The investment was led by Angellist, Smile Group, Manish Amin (COO, Yatra), Anil Goel (CTO, OYO), Anubhav Sonthalia (CEO, Sokrati), Deepak Mittal (CEO, TO THE NEW), among other entrepreneurs from leading companies in India. The company raised its seed funding last year, which was led by the Smile Group and other angel investors. 

The Gurgaon-based startup will use the current funding to build and reinforce the AI-based image editing suite that will help businesses in getting images edited 4x faster with the highest precision. The technology will also ensure the marketplace image specifications and customizations are followed during the bulk processing, helping businesses save up to 90% of the costs. 

Commenting on the development, Sanjay Kumar, Co-founder & CEO, Spyne, said, "Every business - big or small - needs HQ images and videos to sell their products and services online. We are in the business of providing the best visual content and photoshoot services to them anywhere, anytime at ~30% quicker with 99.99% accuracy. With the network of 2500+ highly curated photographers across 35+ cities and industry-first Image processing and distribution technology, we are uniquely placed to cater to the large incoming demand coming from businesses in the post Covid-19 era.” 

“With the current round, we are looking to invest deeper in building the next set of computer vision and Deep tech applications solving complex use cases such as auto editing of images in a click, automated curation and quality check, On the fly Image and Design generation, etc. This will enable us to open new markets in the coming months not only in India but thousands of businesses outside India.", he further added.

Currently, an editor can manually edit at max 150 images per day. The company’s high tech editing suite will help accomplish hundreds of edited images in minutes, guaranteeing up to 90% margins, 99.9% accuracy, and 100% on-time delivery.

"I'm excited about how Sanjay and his team at Spyne are working to solve the Image processing problems, faced by most Online Businesses globally, including us at Oyo. Producing personalized high-quality content at an industrial scale is something which very few companies have been able to achieve anywhere, and I am fully behind the team to achieve it eventually," said Anil Goel, CTO, OYO.

The company is also reinforcing its business operations for SpyneStudios and freelance photography networks across the country. Last month, the company opened its first studio in Delhi NCR and added over 150 freelance photographers to its existing network of over 2500+ freelancers. Spyne plans to spread across tier 2 and tier 3 cities and then to South-Asia and the Middle East to help businesses order any kind of shoot at scale at any time and anywhere. 

Currently, Spyne has 2000+ photographers actively using its high-tech content sharing platform, SpyneShare, which helps photographers generate reviews and more business. So far, 6M+ photos and videos have been shared through SpyneShare product. The company plans to extend this product to businesses as well with add-on AI tech-features to instantly track all their products from pickup for a shoot to final image delivery. This perhaps is a much-needed feature that doesn't exist in the market so far.

“Internet marketplaces all across the globe are growing exponentially. Millions of high-quality images and videos of products/services are published every day on marketplace platforms to improve their traffic and conversions. Still, high-quality content delivery and management remain a daunting task. We see the founder-market fit in Sanjay, given his past experience. Spyne has the potential of becoming a global company,” says the Angellist India team.

The company currently provides a wide array of photoshoot services such as HQ images, videos, social media content, 360-degree shoots, 3D rendering, etc to cater to industries including e-commerce, real estate, fashion, Jewellery, and food. 

Spyne has worked with top national and international brands such as Amazon, Snapdeal, Oyo, Big Basket, WedMeGood, Yatra, PP Jewellers among many others. 

Anubhav Sonthalia, CEO, Sokrati says, “Large companies & small sellers alike do not have easy access to high-quality, timely, and professional talent to get converting content on demand across the entire span of India. Spyne, with its core Shoot and AI-driven Image Processing technology, has built a platform that will make the production of Images and Videos at scale available to every seller, and it is as easy as ordering food.”

Spyne was launched in 2018 by an IIT-Kharagpur alumni Sanjay Kumar who has worked with brands like Amazon, Yatra, OYO, etc and Deepti Prasad from Delhi School of Economics with 8+ years of consulting and marketing experience. The AI-driven company provides photographers a new content management experience and an opportunity to work for top national and international brands. With an aim to fill the high-quality content requirement gap in the industry at high volume and scale, the company aims to be the go-to place for all kinds of shoots, visual content management, and image processing requirements across India and beyond. 

Founding Team:

Sanjay Kumar (Co-founder, CEO): IIT KGP, 2005. Ex Amazon, Oyo, Yatra 12+ years in Deep Tech, Product Built multiple successful Online products for some of the top startups and Consumer companies, used by millions of customers globally. 

Deepti Prasad (Co-founder, Marketing): Delhi School of Economics, 2007 8+ years in Consulting & Marketing Genpact Consulting for 5 years+, Media/Economic Analyst to renowned Economist Omkar Goswami for Question Time Show on NDTV.

AI-based SaaS Startup Spyne Raises Seed Funding led by Smile Group, Others

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.