Milan-headquartered scale-up Boom, which offers a two-sided tech platform to let companies book and manage commercial photo shoots, has raised $7 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by Italy’s United Ventures, with the participation from Wellness Holding. It will be used to support the photo tech company’s next stage of growth as it sets its sights on “5% market share” of the $80bn global digital photography market.
Specifically, Boom says it will invest in its proprietary plug & play technology for managing the commercial photography production pipeline, and build a presence in 180 countries, including opening offices and studios in London and New York. The platform combines a marketplace, logistics, photo online storage, APIs and a CRM, with Boom pitching itself as wanting to become the “Amazon for commercial photography”,
“Today, visual content is more vital than ever,” says Boom co-founder and CEO Federico Mattia Dolci. “Data shows that photography is the second most important key driver for successful online commerce after online payments. This was our opportunity”.
Dolci says that, while demand for high-quality content was huge, when the company was founded in 2018, “there was a lack of scalable solutions”. And scale is the name of the game, with estimates suggesting there was more than 2 trillion photos uploaded online in 2019.
“The largest online sellers have massive, ever-growing image libraries,” says the Boom CEO. “And the faster the market grew, the more we recognised a major digital supply-and-demand gap. We could see that countless internet giants were changing the way people shopped online, uploading billions of pictures on their websites and platforms every day, but these same brands had no access to a content provider that could keep up with their scaled-up, global, fast-paced environment. The whole system was expensive and obsolete”.
To address this, Boom has developed a “tech-first” oder system that enables companies and brands to easily commission “high quality, affordable content” on a global scale. The promise is that it offers a simple, streamlined, automated work-flow, coupled with a network of thousands of professional photographers, without compromising on quality. The platform matches a client photoshoot request with the best photographers in the area. It also employs automatic photo-editing to improve raw shots, so that if a brand wants to get access to photos instantly, the photographer can spend less time editing.
Meanwhile, Boom’s order system doesn’t just manage photoshoots. Clients can also book videographers, drone pilots, designers, and other creative assets using the innovative platform.
To that end, Boom claims in excess of 250 major corporate clients including the likes of Deliveroo, Vacasa, Uber Eats, OYO, Lavanda, Casavo, Westwing, Getyourguide and hundreds of SMEs across verticals. It has a presence in more than 80 countries and has processed 3 million images to date, averaging one shoot per minute, across real estate, travel, F&B, and e-commerce.
Adds Dolci: “Our customers can place an order and expect a delivery 24h later, whether the photoshoots take place in Milan, New York, or Sydney, and whether the order calls for one photoshoot or a thousand! We guarantee speed, efficiency, and quality consistency every single time”.
Noteworthy, Boom says it is profitable on a unit economics basis, bar re-investing in its tech and expansion plans, and aims to be fully profitable as early as 2022.
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