Indian social network raises $120K to help artists make money

Bangalore-based Cupick, which is a social network that helps artists monetize their artwork, announced today that it has raised US$120,000 (INR 75 lakh) via TermSheet.

Many prominent angel investors from India and the US participated in this round including JKN Partners (an angel syndicate), Sushil Agarwal, Rajeev Mudumba, and Dinesh Tadepalli.

TermSheet, which offers a platform that enables early-stage startups to close seed rounds quickly, helped close this round. “TermSheet ensured that the fundraising was frictionless. We went from closing negotiations to announcing it in 15 days. The team members are thorough professionals yet they retained a personal touch throughout our interactions,” says Cupick CEO and founder Shaishav Todi.

“In a frothy market with so much money being invested in food-tech startups, we think it’s important for investors to start looking at other interesting products as well. [Cupick founders] Shaishav, Justin and Rituraj have created an outstanding platform in bootstrapped mode and we’re happy to have helped in some measure toward closing their pre-seed round,” Termsheet founder Vivek Durai told Tech in Asia.

The money will be used to integrate more product features, add more merchandise, and hire across tech and other verticals.

Make art, make money

Cupick was founded in October 2014 by Shaishav Todi, Justin Alva and Rituraj Dowerah. It enables visual artists to showcase, share, and sell their artwork on various merchandise like t-shirts, hoodies, posters, art prints, canvases, and cards. Artists can upload their work in high resolution, choose products to sell, and set their own prices. The company takes care of the printing, shipping, payment collection, and customer service.

“We offer artists with the tools to market and protect their work. Our download protection and auto-watermarking features prevent unauthorized usage of images off of Cupick,” Todi tells Tech in Asia.

Talking about its revenue model, Todi says, “We set a base price on every product which covers our costs and margins. Artists simply mark this up by a percentage which they’d like to earn. To that we add taxes to get the retail price. Post sale, we retain the base amount and artists keep the ‘artist markup’ amount.”

“Currently, we only have a single revenue stream, however, given the strength and size of an ever-growing community of artists and designers, we will be able to diversify and add other channels,” he adds.

To start off Cupick, INR 10 lakh (close to US$16,000) was raised from an HNI. That fund was used toward product development and building early traction. The company was able to start from scratch and build a comprehensive catalogue of quality artwork compiled from its network of registered artists.