Background of founders and what’s the journey behind the idea?
After my engineering, I joined a consulting company through which I got the opportunity to work with Fortune companies in the US. After working for 16 hours each day, I realised that I was just helping the rich get richer. I decided to come back to India and start on my own. My first startup was in the media space. After running that for 3 years, I sold it to a Bombay based production house and exited.
My experience gave me a few insights – that even large corporations are poor at communicating, they have a tough time building human connections and communicating with empathy. Also, they make marketing decisions based on how they feel they should communicate instead of using data to leverage the messaging. That was my lightbulb moment to start Instoried. I knew I could bank upon my long-time friend with his knowledge and experience in technology and got him on board as the CTO.
Instoried helps large companies make their marketing and communications content more human with a data-driven, scalable and repeatable approach using AI, leading to an increased ROI. Our web platform app.instoried.com can be used to feed in content, get the required analysis and optimize the emotional aspect of the content.
Instoried’s customers have witnessed up to 3X increase in incoming leads per post and 2X rise in ROI in less than 6 months.
Tell us more about Instoried and its products?
Instoried is a deep-tech platform that analyzes and predicts the emotional quotient, tonality and relevance of written content across formats like blogs, articles, social media posts.
Instoried uses a data-driven approach using their proprietary AI driven technology to make real time analysis and suggestions to enhance content to increase engagement and interest for the reader. This leads to more clicks and as a result higher ROI for brands, creating a direct impact on sales and revenues for companies. Instoried’s APIs can be easily integrated into any platform that brands may already be using. The company now has product offerings for both enterprises and individuals globally. Their platform helps content writers, in the SME category, e-commerce, FMCG, and other verticals to optimize emotions in their marketing content.
With NLP what are the improvement’s you achieved in different segments like Blogs, eCommerce, News.
We use NLP to analyze semantics of content and identify the Tone, Emotion and impact of content. With the help of Instoried, our clients have increased Engagement of their blogs and marketing communication by optimizing their content’s emotion, tonality and use of impactful text. We help content creators be consistently engaging with the audience.
What’s their USP of Instoried?
We enable content creators (marketeers, social media managers, writers, bloggers, journalists) to create content that is more human and filled with empathy, so that it becomes easier to resonate with their audiences. We use a database of over 10 Mn sentences that have been semantically analyzed to provide our analysis and recommendation without changing the context of the original content.
Early days struggle
My biggest challenge the initial days was; putting together a star team and ensuring that there were enough funds to support them. After exhausting my savings, I had to break my PPF account, in spite of my parents’ disapproving of this move. I had to further mortgage my gold jewellery to pay salaries.
I am glad to share that we now have a strong team, 50% of which are women, a proprietary tech stack and our clients have witnessed up to 3X increase in incoming leads per post and 2X rise in ROI in less than 6 months.
Funding received so far
Instoried has raised $1.5 mn so far from investors including Rockstud Capital, SOSV, Artesian Investments, Mumbai Angels, 9Unicorns, Venture Catalysts, Jain Angel Network, London-based JPIN, and a US-based VC in their pre-Series A round. We raised an undisclosed amount from Rockstud Capital in March this year.
New Areas if they are looking to expand
With our latest round of funding we will focus on reaching out to newer geographies for our existing tool as well as the recently launched tool for individuals (B2C).
We currently focus on analyzing and optimizing the emotional quotient, tonality and relevance of written content across formats like blogs, articles, social media posts. In the future, we will be keen to explore audio and video formats as well.
Future plans
We have a very exciting line-up in place for this year. Our tech team is going to change the way chat works. We are launching our own keyboard for both Android and IOS devices that can be used by any platform. Imagine chatting with your loved ones and being able to gauge the temperature of your chat, and also getting smart recommendations in real time. This is the future of chat and there are endless possibilities. We are going to completely disrupt the compliances industry with the correct measures in place for both social and digital.
