Deeptech Startup Spyne Secures $7 Mn Funding Led By Accel To Fuel Global Expansion

Delhi NCR-based deeptech startup Spyne, helping businesses and marketplaces create high quality product images and videos using AI, has raised $7 Mn in its latest funding round. 

The round was led by Accel with participation from other marquee investors including Storm Ventures, Smile Group, Pentathlon Ventures, Core91, and prominent founders/CXOs from leading internet companies. 

The capital raised would be used in acquiring talent, bolstering global expansion including the US market, and setting up a state-of-the-art computer vision lab for research and development, according to a statement.

The startup also intends to expand its technological horizons into the field of AR/VR to build products for metaverse and omniverse, it said.

With this round, Spyne has raised a total of $7.8 Mn funding since its inception in 2018. It has raised INR 4.5 Cr funding in Pre-Series A round led by AngelList with participation of existing investor Smile Group.

Founded in 2018 by Sanjay Kumar and Deepti Prasad, Spyne develops 100% automatic, industry-first AI image processing products to help large ecommerce marketplaces in the automotive, fashion, and retail industry enhance images without a physical studio. 

“Our vision is to empower sellers to create superior product images and videos without any need of experts. They only need a smartphone to sell online and compete with big sellers. In the last 12 months, we launched multiple use cases across automotive, food, ecommerce, and fashion verticals seeing phenomenal growth in revenues,” said Sanjay Kumar, cofounder and CEO of Spyne.

Spyne is currently serving more than 80 customers including Amazon India, Flipkart, Karvi, OLACars, Sell Any Car, among others, across over 15 countries.

The artificial intelligence (AI) tech products enable businesses to create 500X faster studio-finish images and help them scale operations in real-time, it claims.  

Spyne is using the latest advancements in AI to help small merchants create studio-quality ecommerce catalogs cheaply and quickly. Spyne’s product has already found early adoption from discerning customers globally, said Pratik Agarwal, principal at Accel. 

Meanwhile, the deeptech sector has been performing well with some of the startups raising funds such as Mumbai-based Course5 Intelligence filing draft red herring prospectus in January 2022 for an INR 600 Cr initial public offering (IPO).

Many companies have also acquired stakes in deeptech startups in the past few months. Online grocery giant BigBasket acquired the enterprise business unit of deeptech startup Agrima Infotech in February 2022. BigBasket will implement Agrima Infotech’s computer vision technology platform, Psyight, at the self-checkout counters of its retail stores.

Few days back, multinational technology company Bosch acquired a 14% minority stake in deeptech B2B startup Zeliot Connected Services. 

The year 2020 witnessed more than 14% of all investments in tech startups, majority in the deeptech space. According to Inc42 data, around $1.6 Bn has been poured into the deeptech sector since 2014. 

The Indian deeptech sector is gradually expanding as the number of startups leveraging the segment has increased by 3.5X since 2017, according to a NASSCOM report. 

Coupled with this, the investors’ interest in deeptech has also surged as a 2X growth in funding raised by deeptech startups, the report said.