More than 300M photos are uploaded each day and visual content needs to be top-notch for companies to differentiate themselves in this sea of endless imagery. Splento is the business photography and videography platform that facilitates thousands of food and product shoots for companies around the world including Google and Gucci. To date, Splento has delivered over 1M photos across 47 countries and the market size is very promising due to the millions of businesses that need to visualise services and products through photo, video, AR & VR. In addition, Splento allows people to book photographers on-demand. The company recently rolled out a proprietary facial recognition service that identifies individuals at an event and within seconds emails them the photos they appeared in.
London TechWatch sat down with CEO and Founder Roman Grigoriev to learn more about the company’s pivot, future growth plans, and Splento’s latest funding round.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
I have founded seven businesses, raising over $2M for my latest business, Splento, alone. Through those investment rounds, I have attracted global leaders as investors, board members, and advisors, including Tej Lalvani (Vitabiotics, Dragons Den), Konstantin Kalabin (TripAdvisor), Rob Dembitz (Cannes Lion), Ray Rafiq-Omar (Unmortgage) and many others.
Tell us about the product or service Splento offers.
Splento drives businesses forward with seamless end-to-end photography and videography, all managed on an easy app.
What inspired the start of Splento?
Splento initially started with travel photography and failed. We then swiftly moved into consumer photography, but the unit economics did not stack up to justify further investment into this business model.
We then moved to business photography and videography and which turned out to be very successful for us. However, throughout all of these pivots we kept our vision intact: to help the world move from offline to online. The method of getting from A to B has changed, but the ultimate destination has always been the same.
We’ve learned so much from these pivots that we’ve created a “pivoting framework” and are now launching new business units inside our company. The latest iteration is enterprise photography – tens of thousands of food and product shoots for multinational companies around the world, which is showing even faster growth than B2B photography and videography market. We would not be here without learning from our pivots.
How is Splento different?
Our commitment is to both our photographers and our customers. While some in our industry focus exclusively on their photographers, creating bad customer experiences, and other focus exclusively on their customers, driving away their talent, we look after both sides of the transaction.
Our photographers are vital to our success, so we work hard to keep them happy. Our customers are just as vital to our success, and we’ve even designed new features and functionality for one particular client because we knew that was the solution that they needed.
What market are you targeting and how big is it?
The world is moving online. To move online, almost every industry and every market needs visual content, so it’s challenging to encapsulate the opportunity that’s out there. In just a few years since founding, we have delivered over 1M photos to more than 15K happy customers in 47 countries.
What’s your business model?
Splento gives its customers the option to purchase various visual content solutions directly from Splento or from third-party sellers.
For solutions purchased directly from Splento, Splento is the seller and producer of the content, owns the entire supply chain and fulfills all orders.
For services purchased directly from third-party sellers, Splento acts only as a managed marketplace. The sellers are the producers and fulfill the orders themselves.
What is the process like to partner with big corporations like Google and Gucci?
The process is quite straightforward, but just like with any small client – the most important thing is to keep the customer’s needs in mind. Don’t rush offering what you think they need, instead listen to what are the real problems and challenges and try to solve them.
A good example would be London Tech Week. There are several large corporations involved in this event and each one has its own set of challenges. Google just needed great content delivered the same day and we did it seamlessly. CogX needed 30 photographers shooting across dozens of venues with all photos collected and organised in one neat interface – and we did that too.
For this year we are talking with London Tech Week to provide our platform to upload all the photos from all photographers (not just ours) from hundreds of events happening that week and implementing our facial recognition technology to search for any particular speaker or attendee.
What was the funding process like?
It’s just like a marriage – you need to understand the other party really well before making the jump. It took us 18 months from our “first date” to signing on the dotted line.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Fundraising is a very labour intensive process and will distract you from the main focus of any company: delivering the best service you can to your customers!
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The size of the opportunity.
At the moment, only 10% of transactions are done online, the rest are still offline. Businesses need visual content to sell something online.
There are millions of businesses selling billions of products and services. All this needs to be visualised: photo, video, AR & VR.
An enormous fast-growing market that’s ripe for disruption.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We are developing new technology features all the time – just last year, we released Splento’s Facial Recognition, which identified individuals at an event and within seconds emailed them the photos they appeared in. In 2020, we’ll be taking our technology to the next level, though the details are currently under wraps!
We are developing new technology features all the time – just last year, we released Splento’s Facial Recognition, which identified individuals at an event and within seconds emailed them the photos they appeared in. In 2020, we’ll be taking our technology to the next level, though the details are currently under wraps!
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Think differently. If you do not have additional investment coming in, you need to start getting creative with the funding you already have. Whatever you haven’t tried before, now is the time to consider them.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Splento already delivers excellence in 263 cities around the world, and we’re looking to grow further.
What’s your favorite tourist destination in London?
I personally love running – my marathon personal best is 2:53:41. Running on the streets of London is incredible, as you get to see completely different views of the city and get to know it in a fresh new way.
