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Entrepreneur Manik Kinra and Sitashwa Srivastava led Jade Magnet gets seed funding

Thursday January 14, 2010 , 4 min Read

Scaling up India’s 2nd largest crowdsourcing platform – Jade Magnet!

It’s probably the first time that you will hear someone branding themselves as 2nd largest in their field but then that’s what these guys are good at. Bringing in a revolution in design and creatives services with their innovative model, Jade Magnet (earlier known to many as creADivity) is an ecosystem providing services across the creative bandwidth like branding, advertising, animation, communication, graphic design, and product design across various media.

So what’s new?

It’s the operating model and the way these services are delivered which is interesting and innovative. Jade Magnet as on today has more than 1100 creative providers on their network providing services to more than 45 clients. Also on platform are “partners” who complete the eco system by taking care of execution of campaigns, printing and, plugging technology behind designs and many other services.

So how’s been the journey so far?

2007-08 is when Sitashwa Srivastava and Manik Kinra, two young entrepreneurs with a missionary zeal to create the next big idea in India, completed a pilot program using creADivity platform to access the market and then went ahead and applied for TiE EAP evaluation. They presented the results of the pilot to the EAP evaluation panel to back the idea. It was an initial proof of concept and was selected for EAP. At that time the platform had 45 providers and two pilot clients to show case their business.   

TiE Support during EAP

TiE provided exceptional mentoring support and great networking opportunities to Sitash and Manik. The team was invited to TiE Entrepreneurial Summit 2008 to meet potential mentors, investors and people from related fields – all of which helped give shape to the business model. A new, better, platform was launched and business began to pick up as the team got its first few clients and meanwhile the same time, the provider support increased from 45 to 500. It was at this point that TiE introduced the team to Muki Regunathan, Founder & CEO of pepper square, one of India’s finest creative agencies pioneering in online media. Muki brought 16 years of branding, creative and technology experience, and a lot of passion and tremendous energy to the table. The mutual interest established a great rapport. 

Mentoring and Angel Investment

Sitash and Manik raised $200,000 seed investment from Muki. The company was rebranded as “Jade Magnet” and has started working aggressively on building the online platform and expanding the service ecosystem. The team received a lot of personal leadership advice and grooming from their mentors.  

The most pressing need of any start-up is getting a foothold in potential customer organizations. Muki has been able to leverage his network of contacts for the benefit of Jade Magnet, which has brought in a 100% month-on-month growth in sales. The team has also taken his help in building strong delivery processes that are extremely crucial to the business, given the ever-expanding provider-base that Jade Magnet has cultivated. 

Next Steps  

With a current advertising and creative development market size of more than $80 billion (India & US), Jade Magnet is working to bring a paradigm shift in the way creative services are delivered. Now Jade Magnet is suitably placed to propel itself to great heights and is taking the right steps in aggressively expanding its universe of providers and partners. The customer support is increasing every day and within 3 years, Jade Magnet intends to become the top creative destination for small and medium businesses across world markets.

Why 2nd Largest crowdsourcing platform in India, who is the largest?  

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem solving process and in India one of the few times all of us get together is during the National elections to elect our Government. That essentially makes Indian Democracy the largest crowdsourcing network in India.