The relatively new state of Andhra Pradesh and its capital Amaravati would want to regain the glory of the undivided state run from Hyderabad. Businesses need to be attracted to the new capital and to the major cities like Vijayawada and Vishakhapatnam. One AP-based startup, Picxy.com has at least been in the news for attracting investment, though the quantum of fund raised may not be very large.
Founded by two entrepreneurs relocating to India from the US, Jitendra Emmani and Vamsi Mannem, Picxy.com’s business model is built around a stock of photographs on their website which they pay and collect from the best professional photographs and then these are curated with the story around the photo also created. Buyers can go through the gallery and buy and use these photographs. The team at Picxy.com is quite hung ho with South Asia and most photographs are from these parts of the world.
The venture itself is only a few months old and it has received an investment of $130,000 from individuals who are at senior levels in Amazon and technology company Cisco. These are regular angel investors though their names have not been disclosed. The company’s overall valuation is being quoted at $1 million.
The startup is in the continuous process of adding to its stock of photographs and has an ambitious target of building an inventory of 3 million photographs in the coming 3 years. For this purpose, they have an ongoing programme to recruit more photographers (they have around 1000 enlisted currently) and encouraging them to submit their work. They hold periodical ‘Meet ups’ in major cities to bring the photographers into their net.
Picxy uses technology to sort the photographs and tag them and machine learning is deployed extensively to achieve this. Their photos get geo-tagged and can be searched on the map. Picxy has a corporate vision of becoming South Asia's largest stock photo company.
Some of the marquee clients the company has been able to attract so far include Ogilvy and Mather, GroupM, Govt of Andhra Pradesh and AP Tourism. There are plans to add to the product line by offering large canvas prints of the photographs that can become backdrops in interiors in large households. These will be directly sold to customers.