APUS Group, China’s fastest growing unicorn with over 510 million global users has acquired Venture Catalysts-backed Siftr Labs for an undisclosed amount. With the acquisition, Venture Catalysts has successfully exited the photo-curation platform and has yet again proved its forte for helping budding business ventures make their mark in the highly competitive business landscape.
Romil Mittal, Co-founder and CEO, Siftr Labs, said, “Our team has always been passionate about building innovative tech products with the potential to impact and enhance people’s lives. We strive to deliver in terms of performance. Our global elevation has given us an opportunity to keep doing the same on a much larger scale and at a faster pace. We would like to thank APUS Group for identifying our potential as well as to the entire team at Venture Catalysts, without whose valuable contributions this could not have been possible.”
Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder, Venture Catalysts said, “The acquisition will help Siftr to grow vertically by tapping the extensive global experience of the premier unicorn. It has been a delightful experience to work together with Siftr and we strongly believe that the business venture will unlock new horizons within its sphere. This deal has also hinted towards continued interest of global players in building their arsenal of machine learning technologies, and has marked the beginning of sustained Chinese tech acquisitions on Indian soil.”
Mr. Vishal Maheswari, Chief Mentor Analyst, Venture Catalysts said, “From the day I’ve been associated with Siftr, I observed the high sense of enthusiasm and passion that the team has, not just for the product but for learning and challenging themselves. It is this energy and willingness to push the envelope of excellence that has helped the team find favour with the APUS Group as well. I’m certain that the acquisition will help them to take the product to the next level and fulfill its true potential.”
Founded by veterans from Adobe, Qualcomm, and Samsung with significant expertise in machine learning, image processing, and mobile development, Siftr Labs is a leading technology-driven photo-curation platform. By leveraging deep learning technology it has developed a proprietary Computer Vision Engine that can perform multiple ground-breaking tasks including object identification, facial recognition, age and gender detection, as well as perceiving photo genres with an unrivaled precision.
The platform had also developed an innovative mobile application, ‘Siftr Magic’, which enables its users to delete junk and irrelevant photos on their devices. Due to its superior market positioning, the application became viral across the globe as soon as it was rolled out. The photo-curation platform has worked together with cohorts of investors, market leaders, and domain experts at Venture Catalysts who provided it with domain-specific insights, appropriate entrepreneurial pedigree, and mentorship, something that contributed to its success and international recognition.
Having facilitated investments to the tune of $3 million in 16 start-ups nationally and overseas in the past one year, Venture Catalysts has established its position as the most active angel investment network in the country. The platform enables seed funding in the region of $100,000 to $1 million into promising early-stage and mid-stage ventures across a range of high-growth sectors such as e-commerce, fintech, artificial intelligence, and logistics etc., and currently has more than 2000 investors associated with it.
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Feature Source: gomindsight.com
