Kottayam native Nayar and two friends are looking to raise funds by divesting 15 per cent stake.CamCom was born with the idea to help people gift a product to somebody by clicking a photo of the product.It uses a mix of object recognition, AI, machine learning and analytics to make shopping easy
KOCHI: It is estimated people all over the world may have taken 1.2 trillion photos using a smartphone in 2017 alone. Nearly 55 per cent of these photos is of food and beverages. Yet little has been done to convert this humongous number into a business possibility, considering that most of the photos are objects of their desire.
CamCom (short for Camera Commerce), a Bengaluru-based startup, is attempting to monetise this big opportunity, using what it calls ‘click and buy’ model. “If people are clicking so many pictures, there is definitely an interest to buy these products, given the millennials’ interest to acquire anything immediately,” says Ajith Nayar, one of the founders. He quit his well-paying jobs at Wipro and AugRay, to form CamCom along with two of his friends.
The startup was born with the idea to help people gift a product to somebody by clicking a photo of the product. “The idea was to click a picture of anything, and I should be able to gift it to somebody,” adds Nayar, a native of Kottayam.
Since gifting is a “big thing”, especially in India, Nayar spoke to Pramod Solanky, his colleague at AugRay. Solanky came back with a prototype within two months. Nayar showed the prototype to Umesh, who worked with him at Wipro. Umesh was so bullish on the product that he quit his job at Wipro and joined Nayar and Solanky. “It was a leap of faith decision,” says Nayar.
After moving into ‘Mobile10X’, the Karnataka government’s incubator in February last year, the trio’s startup created a product ‘Gifto’. In September, the company ran the pilot of the app at a friend’s store ‘Smoor Chocolates’ in Bengaluru for 45 days. “It saw 500-odd downloads, 350-plus transactions and a lakh in revenue (during the pilot),” explains Nayar. The experience told the ‘Gifto’ team that they were into “something good”.
But, it also taught them another thing. By restricting the app to be used only for gifting, they were essentially limiting the scope and the market for the product.“Gifting is something we do maybe once in a month, while we buy something almost every day,” he says. The team went back to the drawing board and re-wrote the entire code to deal with the buying process as well.
He says the new CamCom mobile app now uses a mix of object recognition, AI, machine learning and analytics to make shopping a close to the real experience.Meanwhile, CamCom also received some interesting parallel business too. For instance, the company assisted Unisys, an American IT service provider mostly for airports and airlines, to identify dogs! “A friend of mine who works with Unisys asked if we could identify dogs, and there are 125 different breeds of dogs,” he explains. Airlines carry dogs from mostly Europe and US, and it a logistical nightmare.
“You need to understand the breed of the dog for you to decide on what kennel it has to be put, what temperature it requires, the air that has to be circulated and the food the animal has to be fed,” he says, adding that if one gets the breed of the dog wrong, there is every chance that the dog might die before the flight reaches the destination.
Unisys became CamCom’s first client, the startup’s B2B customer, a deal that fetched the trip $5,000.
There are other interesting requests as well, such as identifying rotten tomatoes for a big vegetable supplier. According to Nayar, 15 per cent of the perishable items that comes to this supplier’s godown is rotten, and they can’t even send it back.
“We took the photo of the rotten items and helped them identify the perishable goods on the conveyor belt itself.”Similarly, CamCom is helping an e-commerce firm which is mostly into apparels, accessories and shoes for inbound quality checks.
“For this company, there are 47 people out of 127 doing the job of checking every item that comes in. It’s an extremely inefficient process, and we helped them,” he explains.In Kerala, it has held talks with Kitex for quality checking their kid’s wear products to ensure there are no rejections.
The company which is completely bootstrapped is now talking to three venture capital funds for raising money. CamCom is looking to divest 12-15 per cent stake, and the company hopes to complete the process in coming weeks.
How exactly CamCom works?
CamCom defaults to the phone camera. The consumer just needs to point the camera to any product of interest (it can be at a mall, at the home, at an airport or even the street) and clicks the picture of the products. CamCom app analyses the image, classifies the product and detects details about the product. It uses an NLP (natural language processing) techniques to construct the product description. This description is shown to the consumer and the same is passed on to the merchant site to bring out options and the price for the consumer. The consumer can select the product from the options presented and make a transaction.