Marketplace for photographers and videographers Flatpebble secures $600K from IAN

Photographers focused marketplace Flatpebble that helps people hire high-quality photographers, videographers and stylists, has raised $600K from Indian Angel Network (IAN). Sanjay Jesrani and Subram Kapoor have led this round on behalf of IAN and will eventually join the board of the company.

The funding will be used to tweak the product, increase supply depth as well as expand into other categories. The brainchild of Venkatesan Seshadri and Pranav Mehta, the platform has over 2500 photographers and other service professionals.

Flatpebble has a fabric of true marketplace as it’s driven by active supplier involvement. The platform provides world class video and photo portfolios, budget estimator for customers, verified reviews, and an easy communication system from within Flatpebble.

Speaking on the fund raise, Venkatesan Seshadri, CEO & Co- founder of Flatpebble said,

At Flatpebble, we take an in-depth approach to services. For every category, we go the extra mile to understand customer needs as well as the service provider's business requirements. Our solution is focused on helping service providers succeed, while ensuring choice and price transparency for consumers.

While working at Microsoft in Malaysia, Pranav Mehta and Venky Seshadri were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. The duo started off with an idea to help artists and photographers sell art to consumers.

However, the duo realised that the bulk of their business comes from assignments and the current channels were inefficient or outdated. Without wasting further time, they pivoted their idea and started Flatpebble.

Sanjay Jesrani & Subram Kapoor, the IAN lead investors, commented on the investment saying,

The local services space is a $ 50 billion opportunity and an extremely difficult problem to solve. The Flatpebble team has crafted a scalable solution to this problem, which is resonating with customers and service providers. At IAN, we look forward to backing ventures with a disruptive approach to daily problems. We are confident that Flatpebble will rapidly achieve a leadership position in the target markets both in India and globally.

YourStory’s take

At present, the company competes with Piconect and Qyk along with some other horizontal on-demand platforms like Urbanclap and Urbanpro among several others. With this round, Flatpeeble will be in a better position to rub shoulder with competition, scale fast and expand to other cities.

Importantly, with this fund infusion it’s not clear whether Flatpebble will also go the horizontal way and foray into other hyperlocal services like technicians and carpenter among others. The overall hyperlocal is having a ball with service plus product focused on-demand startups have raised over $160 million plus risk capital. Going forward it would be interesting to watch how overall hyperlocal space evolves in the future.