Picxy an Amravati, Andhra Pradesh-based stock photo startup only few months old managed to raise $130,000 from investors like senior executives of e-commerce magnets such as Amazon and Cisco Exicutives. Initially post this funding the startup was valued to be $1 million. However the names of these individuals who have funded on this startup have not been disclosed.
Two US return entrepreneurs, Jitendra Emmani and Vamsi Mannem are the founders of Picxythe .com. While Vamsi was working as a software developer for a product in Texas, Jitendra was the vice president of Strategic Analytics of Citi Group in US till mid 2017 and also had earlier worked with Amazon. They both quit their job to form Picxy which is based on a business model made with a stock of photographs on their website that they collect from quality photographers by paying them and then these are shortlisted with a story behind the photo, that’s how the photo is created. People can browse these pictures on their website and buy these photos and use them as per their own convenience.
To make it more easier for buyers to surf Picxy uses a technology to systematically sort the photographs and tag them for which machine learning used extensively to achieve this result. Their photos also automatically get geo-tagged through GPS making them easy to be searched on the map.
Jitendra, is the CEO of Picxy while Vamsi is the CTO of the startup which is now covering 11 South Asian countries currently enlisting 1000 photographers and is in a continuous process to add more stock to their gallery.
Picxy has an ambitious target of building an inventory consisting of 3 million photographs in the coming 3 years and also has a corporate vision of becoming South Asia’s largest stock photo company in the long run.
For this, they have a programme to encourage and hire photographers to click qualitative pictures which they can present on their website’s platform. There are plans to add to the gallery stock by offering large canvas version of the photographs that can become backgrounds and backdrops while interior planning in large households. These will be directly sold to customers
The startup also holds periodical meetings held to explain their process and aim to photographers in major cities so that more photographers can be attracted. Some of the valued clients the company has been able to attract so far include Ogilvy and Mather, GroupM, Govt of Andhra Pradesh and AP Tourism.
The authentic and raw pictures of India that Picxy has also competes with other similar photography companies such as that of Images Bazaar founded by Sandeep Maheshwari, Bangalore-based Photoconcierge, Photosindia as well as globally famous companies like Getty Images and Shutterstock.
Picxy in relation to all the companies mentioned above comparatively wants to be different so that it can its first of a kind search engine for photographs thus making it easier for buyers. It wants to cover the entire of India even in the smallest of regions and for which Picxy claims that it now has at least one photograph in every 20 square km area all over india.
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