StartIn: Welcome on our Spotlight series! Can you please give us a quick introduction about yourself and your team, please?
Elaf: Great to be here! I studied Engineering at Warwick University and my dissertation was in deep learning, machine learning. After university, I worked in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs then left after a couple years to start a company. Prior to caspa AI, I was building a startup which helped companies outsource engineering projects to future hires which raised VC funding.
Ahmed and Adam are my cofounders. Ahmed and I are siblings and have worked on a bunch of projects together. We met our third cofounder Adam earlier this year and he moved to the UK from Canada so we could work together full time. Before caspa, Ahmed was working as a VC tech investor at M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), covering B2B / Vertical SaaS investments globally and Adam was working as an AI researcher, specialising in computer vision.
StartIn: Could you share a quick overview of your start-up? Your product, your market / target group, and in which stage are you currently in (MVP, funding, scaling, etc.)?
Elaf: Yes, caspa AI helps users create and customise product photos in minutes using state of the art AI tech to optimise their marketing strategy. A few features inc. realistic human models, your own products, resizing photos, multiple products in one image and start to finish AI photo editing, ready to post online or offline content.
We’re targeting small to medium businesses, marketing teams, e-commerce and consumer goods brands but are interested in speaking with any and everyone interested! We’re currently running closed alpha trials and building up a waitlist of people who are interested. We’ll be onboarding people from the waitlist in batches to manage scaling.
StartIn: It is very impressive that you have co-founded 4 start-ups since you started university, what is the most significant lesson you have learned from these experiences?
Elaf: You might hear it a lot but moving quickly, iterating based on user feedback and failing fast beats perfectionism almost every time. Also, never be afraid to reach out to people cold – usually, the worst that happens is you don’t hear back.
StartIn: When utilizing Caspa AI for leisure or commercial purposes, should one have concerns regarding data privacy and copyright issues?
Elaf: Images created on caspa AI can be used commercially and there are no copyright issues from our side. Legal frameworks and regulations surrounding AI-generated content is still evolving and can vary across jurisdictions but we’re staying ahead of this and hope to keep users informed as things progress!
StartIn: What do you think is the biggest challenge for Caspa AI currently and what are your next steps?
Elaf: There is a lot of noise in the space right now and we want to stay ahead of the curve. Focus is so important, we’re going to continue prioritising early user feedback, grow the waitlist to get more market validation and start onboarding more users onto the platform while we continue to provide the best service possible. Although we’re heads down right now, we plan on fundraising and growing the team soon.
StartIn: What advice would you give to students who are interested in starting a business centered around AI?
Elaf: If you take a step back from the world of AI, step one of starting a successful business is finding a problem that people have, ideally a problem that is such a pain they’d be willing to pay you to fix it. Next try to validate it by building the most basic solution and hearing what those people think then continue to iterate from here – this is where you can start leveraging AI to build a significantly advanced solution. Remember that at the start, it’s better to have 100 people that love you than 1000 people that like you.
StartIn: Thank you for sharing your story!
Follow her personal LinkedIn link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elafdeyab/
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Follow their company Instagram handle: @caspa.ai Share your company TikTok handle: @caspa.ai
See their company webpage: www.caspa.ai
Share any other links (app store etc.): twitter: @caspaAi
Are you currently hiring / looking for investors?: We will be soon!