How We Launched A Generative AI Startup, Caspa, To Create Unique Product-Focused Images
We are thrilled to speak with Elaf, one of the Caspa founders, about how their generative AI startup is advancing the creation and editing of photos for SMBs. Elaf will share her story of building a startup in the AI space as well as the unique ways Caspa is leveraging AI to create and edit photos. Learn from those who are influencing the future of this fascinating field as we explore the world of AI startups. Hey Elaf, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your company? Hey! Yes, of course, I studied Engineering at Warwick with my dissertation being in AI, specifically deep learning within Machine learning. After graduating, I went to work at Goldman Sachs. I left GS towards the end of the pandemic to build a company. I’ve built a few startups over the past few years, mostly with my brother Ahmed. The most recent one helped companies outsource engineering projects to future hires which raised VC funding but I’ve been focused on Caspa for the past few months.
How did you meet with your co-founders and come up with the idea for Caspa? Ahmed and I are siblings and we met our third cofounder Adam through Entrepreneur First, Adam moved to the UK from Canada so we could work on Caspa together full-time. Ahmed has an Aeronautical engineering Masters from Imperial College London. His most recent experience is as a venture capital tech investor at M12 - Microsoft’s venture fund, covering Enterprise/B2B/Vertical SaaS investments globally, prior to that he covered the same sector at Atomico. Adam is an AI researcher by background, he completed a Master’s in Maths & Engineering at Queen’s University while receiving multiple scholarships, working with researchers from Johns Hopkins University.
One of the companies that Ahmed & I built was a digital marketing agency that we grew from 0-1M+ reach. We worked with clients such as Wagamama, Apple Music and Uber as well as a bunch of SMBs on Ad campaigns and content creation. When I met Adam, I instantly knew that the current state of tech would be brilliantly placed to help SMBs, similar to the ones we had worked with in the past. We spent the first couple of months doing customer development to understand exactly what people would want to see.
How did you go from idea to product? Things have moved very quickly because as a team we have both commercial and technical experience in the space. We started off by offering a consulting-like service to brands where we create images for them in return for a monthly fee - we got feedback from early users asking if we could make it possible for them to play around with making AI images of their products themselves because they understand their products better than anyone else. We started putting together the Caspa AI platform and have now built the first version. We’re running closed alpha trials at the moment and are building up a waitlist of people who are interested. Getting feedback and iterating quickly is super important to us, and we plan on letting people on from the waitlist in batches asap.
Did you raise any funding from investors? Not yet because we’ve been very heads down. We’ve had a lot of investor interest so far though and plan to fundraise soon.
What sets your company apart from others in the field? We have 4 main categories of competitors from a product photography perspective:
Traditional product photographers/photoshoots services
Traditional photo editing tools
AI SaaS image editing tools
AI text-to-image generators
We’re different both commercially and technically.
Commercial - our focus is providing a full vertical suite for marketers at SMBs as opposed to being a design tool like many competitors. We strive to be an all-in-one suite that allows users to both generate AI image collateral for their social media/advertising/e-commerce websites and use analytics to optimise their ad performance and improve brand awareness.
Technical - a few tech features keeping us ahead of the curve include:
Free AI photos
Realistic human models
Multiple images in one image
Text-to-image AI stock photo generation
Your own products (inc. resizing of photos etc.)
Start to finish AI photo editing, ready to post online or offline content inc. standard templates, adding text onto the photos
Finally, what are your long-term goals for the future of Caspa? Ultimately, we want to enable SMBs to create unique content in minutes so they can worry less about marketing and more about improving their products and revenues. Creating unique AI images is just the beginning and we’ve got a bunch of things in our roadmap, this includes:
The entire vertical suite of marketing content collateral e.g. different assets such as gifs, videos etc.
Integrated analytics solutions that enable SMBs to seamlessly market their business so they can optimise revenues.
Elaf's insights into the world of AI startups and the unique ways Caspa is using generative AI have been truly inspiring. Jobdai is dedicated to creating a community where founders, investors, and anyone else interested in AI can connect and learn from one another. We believe that knowledge and experience sharing are essential to the success of startups. Don't hesitate to visit Jobdai if you want to become a member of our community and keep up with the most recent information and trends in the world of AI startups.
