Product photography app Pictor to target US & Europe markets

With a mission to make product photography simple and standardised, Pictor was launched in November 2015, by five friends — Siddharth Chilukuri, Neelesh Soni, Gaurav Raj, Ankit Jain and Akshay Sathaye.

From their interactions with online retailers and manufacturers, they realised that product digitisation (photography and cataloging) was one of the most important aspects while selling online.

“Being a skill-based endeavour, the industry was highly unorganised, and was a constant source of dissatisfaction to customers. We felt that many of those problems related to accessibility, reliability and transparency could be solved with technology and operational excellence,” says Gaurav Raj, one of the co-founders.

The startup in May 2016 received Rs 1 crore as seed funding from Delhi-based manager of private investment partnerships, Quarizon. It is currently in the process of raising more capital to fuel growth in both Indian and foreign markets.

The app, an intelligent application, helps online sellers and manufacturers click online ready photographs of their products using their mobile phones without any external equipment. “We get them retouched by our team of graphic artists, and the app recommends the angles specific to the product type. Once the image is captured, the artificial intelligence scans the image for issues and suggests suitable changes, enabling the user to get high quality product shots suitable for retouching,” explains Raj.

These shots are then bundled as a product and tagged with their SKU Codes and
uploaded to Pictor for retouching. The user then receives a quotation for retouching the images. “Once the quotation is accepted, a combination of algorithms and graphic artists are used to retouch the image and make it ecommerce compliant,” he adds.
Till date, Pictor has processed over 2.5 lakh images, and it plans to increase the number by 10 times by next year.

“We have successfully converted a highly creative process into a mass production system. We have already achieved 60% automation of the post-production pipeline, and are targeting to achieve close to 90% automation in the next six months using Deep Learning methods,” says another co-founder and COO Ankit Jain.

The startup’s clients are ecommerce companies and online sellers. Flipkart, Velvetcase, GS1 and Amazon Now are using Pictor for their cataloging. Pictor is also at the pilot stage with other Indian ecommerce companies.

On its future plan, Raj says, “We aim to be the defacto imaging solution provider for ecommerce globally. Most of the ecommerce marketplaces have in-house photography teams and studios to cater to private label products as well as products of high value partners. Pictor’s technology and backend services not only allow them to reduce cost and space but also provide a highly scalable and fast solution,” adding that they are planning to target the US and Europe markets.