Tagbin’s Immersive Media Platform Finds Enterprise Niche In The AI Age

Immersive technology and AI startup Tagbin, which designed a virtual statue of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose to realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream back in 2022, is fresh off a  $10 Mn (around INR 90 Cr) funding round to scale its AI-SaaS platform. 

The creator of the giant, virtual sculpture at New Delhi’s India Gate attracted investors like SageOne Flagship Growth OE Fund, Kurl-on Group, and a host of angel investors. 

The brains behind the ‘The Parakram Diwas’ feat were Saurav Bhaik, Abhishek Negi, and Ankit Sinha, who incorporated the company in 2013 with a vision to explore and disrupt emerging technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality. “AI was still a faraway reality those days,” Bhaik said.

Twelve years later, the AI opportunity has given new wings to Tagbin and it’s now targetting enterprises with its immersive holographic technology. 

“With the simple idea of being a pioneer in using the emerging technology, we started in 2013. The initial few years were very slow because nobody wanted to experiment with something new,” he recounted.

Besides immersive technology, Tagbin has developed its AI-SaaS platform Workly for task management and communication. Though it was initially developed as part of a NITI Aayog project in 2022, it is now commercially available for corporates to leverage AI in their day-to-day decision-making. 

The success of the latest funding round adds to the company’s push to go public in 2027. But, what is the chance of success for a company in a land of more than 150 native AI startups that have collectively raised more than $1.5 Bn since 2020?

Tagbin, which competes with the likes of CSDirekt, Pan Intellecom, and Moving Pixels, claims to have a 360-degree approach, where it is solving every aspect of immersive experience – from research and content curation to architecture layout and 3D modelling.

The startup has been part of many government-led projects and campaigns, including Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya, State War Museum, Bihar GenNext Lab, and Har Ghar Tiranga, while also serving brands like Adidas, Microsoft and Toyota.

“If you are making a museum, it starts from research, then content curation, making a storyline, and then it goes to the design team. The architecture layout is done before it gets into 3D modelling. A production team makes a working drawing before sending it for the final assembly. Then the software is made, the content is developed, and hardware is born,” Bhaik explained.

“These are finally integrated and tested to create a final experience. Since this requires a multidimensional team, we have an in-house team for all of that.” 

Talking of its market edge, Bhaik said that most of its competitors excel in one of the departments and rely on their partners for other tasks. The company attributes its unique selling price (USP) to having control over the final output as well as strong team coordination – both due to in-house operations at every stage of building an immersive experience. “Our prices are also very competitive, because the majority of the things are done in-house,” he added.

The Research Behind The Reality

The founding trio, alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, chose emerging technologies as the topic of research for the final-year thesis. They were stuck at the idea of bringing this research to life. 

That’s where the concept of Tagbin came up first. “We three have been together for the last 12 years. And my passion was how we could implement this research in emerging technologies for industries and how they could create more value to these companies, industries or the government. Back then, by emerging technologies, I meant machine learning. AI was not very advanced at that stage,” Bhaik said. 

While talking of the early years, he recounted how Indian markets shied away from investing into something new. Tagbin got its fair share of traction in the Middle East, primarily in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and in the Far Eastern markets of Singapore. While handling a few projects in Dubai, the Tagbin team discovered that they could use technologies like AR, VR and hologram to create a whole-new experience for their clients. 

Tagbin initially kept its foot in the immersive technologies space by collaborating with brands like Oreo, some more brands from Cadbury’s, Hero, Microsoft, Lava, Uber, Coca-Cola, and Mercedes Benz for their tech-first campaigns and marketing projects. 

“They used our technology for marketing, training or other purposes. These were not very big projects, but it led to the breakthrough as we won the design competition for the Prime Minister’s Museum in 2019,” the cofounder added. 

In 2022, Tagbin piloted an AI strategy lab for the NITI Aayog to help policymakers and bureaucrats strategise policies. It later replicated the project for Bihar, Telangana, Assam, and Tamil Nadu. That’s how the startup entered into the AI-based solutions segment.

The job for the Bihar planning department resulted in the idea for Workly. “It was a project transformed into a product. The Bihar planning department gave us that project. We smelt a huge potential in it and worked more until we began selling it to our private clients,” Bhaik said.

How Tagbin’s Platform Works

At present, Tagbin has two revenue verticals – creative technology and AI – to address an expanding ambit of public and private companies. While creative technology caters majorly to museums and implementation of AR and VR technologies to offer new experiences, the AI segment offers workflow management solutions to companies and also includes its product Workly.

“AI is a pure service where we help any company with their needs. But the only product we have right now is Workly, which we sell like an enterprise solution. The two verticals together make us a service and a product company,” Bhaik said. 

Workly offers AI agents to companies to streamline their daily tasks in segments like sales, marketing and decision-making. There are 25 clients using it with a subscription fee of around $8 per user.

The creative technology segment, handled primarily by Negi, offers a product suite as well. Among the campaigns run by this vertical is Teleportation Bus, a virtual environment made for schools and tourism departments. AI Holobox, another creative project, blends AI, ML, AR, VR, and spatial computing to deliver lifelike holographic experiences. Directional Speakers, built with in-motion sensing, personalised listening and multiuser model in mind, allows individuals to enjoy diverse audio experiences simultaneously.

“These are not 100% scalable products. These are solutions which we are selling to different organisations and companies. But the most scalable solution till now is Workly,” Negi said. 

Enterprises In Focus 

And that’s the biggest focus for Tagbin in the next year, especially as the company has plans to go for a listing by 2027, if everything goes as per plan. And in terms of the financials, the company has reached a position of stability.

“We are profitable,” claimed cofounder Bhaik, and said Tagbin recorded INR 110 Cr in revenue for FY25. Its net profit for the year reached 18% of the topline at INR 19.8 Cr. For the year ending March 2026 (FY26), Tagbin is aiming at a topline growth to INR 250 Cr. 

Now that Tagbin has a wider vision to be AI-focussed, it is shifting from creative technology. The company earns 60% of its revenue from the creative technology segment and 40% from the AI wing. It now hopes to see the topline contributions switching. “It will be the opposite – 60-70% AI and 30-40% creative technology,” he said. 

According to Negi, most of the AI projects for Workly are licence-based. The customers need to bear this licence cost repeatedly, resulting in recurring revenue for the company. “If you do, let’s say, INR 30 Cr this year from AI, and 50% of it is licence cost, then INR 15 Cr will automatically get added to the next year. That is how I am imagining this revenue will grow, because it’s cumulative,” he added.

To fuel this potential revenue driver, Tagbin is using the freshly raised capital in building Workly and more AI use cases, which can be presented to the customers. Additionally, the platform is looking to strengthen its AI verticals by some servers to facilitate on-premise computing for government clients. For this, Tagbin will deploy the capital into hardware like GPUs.

“For government clients, the number one requirement is that all the compute or processing should happen on-premise. So we cannot use cloud processing because they are particular about where data is being stored. So for that, we always do on-premise computing,  like a small data center type of thing. The investment would go into hardware, buying these GPUs, building and strengthening more use cases and building this product work,” Bhaik added.