Media processing company Gumlet raises $1.6 mn led by Sequoia’s Surge

Gumlet, a SaaS startup providing new-age media delivery infrastructure to automate the media publishing pipeline, on Tuesday announced $1.6 million in funding by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge.

Gumlet helps developers resize and optimise their images and videos in accordance with the end user’s device or browser, delivering high-quality media at the lowest possible bandwidth.

While media files such as images, GIFs, videos and animations are integral to all digital interactions and experiences today, current solutions for managing and publishing such content are still limited. This is largely due to their reliance on APIs that require deep integration, domain knowledge and constant maintenance.

“Gumlet is all about offering a plug-and-play solution for media management and publishing. This in turn helps online businesses provide better UX, load pages faster, save cloud costs and improve SEO – resulting in tangible business impact. More than just delivering a SaaS tool for online publishers and businesses, our mission is to build a media delivery infrastructure for the internet,” said Aditya Patadia, founder of Gumlet.

Founded in 2019 in Singapore, Gumlet saw an opportunity to create an easily-integrated tool to handle media processing for a plethora of formats, device sizes and platforms. Once integrated, all previous, new and upcoming images are automatically optimised for any user. Gumlet takes over resizing, compression, format conversion, transcoding, streaming, delivery and analytics for all media files.

By providing low- or no-code integration plug-ins that automate the entire media publishing pipeline, Gumlet helps developers experience 30-50% better optimisation without affecting quality.

Gumlet currently serves more than 6,000 customers including online stores, news sites, blogs, edtech startups, travel sites and crowdfunding portals. Some clients include Colearn, YourStory and Bestseller Group. Over four billion media files are delivered every week via Gumlet, resulting in 25% month-on month growth since the start of 2020.

According to Data Bridge Market Research, the media processing solutions market will reach an estimated value of $36.63 billion and grow at a CAGR of 13.85% in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028. Rise in the advancements in technology and significant growth of streaming services and platforms is an essential factor driving the media processing solutions market.

“As the internet becomes increasingly global and data-hungry, serving images and video in a high-performance, low-latency environment is fundamental for all websites to earn customer trust. With Gumlet, developers never have to worry about managing different versions and sizes of media files again,” said Divyesh Patel, Co-Founder and CMO of Gumlet.

Gumlet was founded by Aditya Patadia and Divyesh Patel, who previously built, scaled and successfully exited from Turing Analytics, an AI startup in the image recognition and visual search space. Aditya is also the creator of a popular open-source image resize library in the PHP language, which he launched in 2012.

Angel investors Aakrit Vaish, Miten Sampat, Swapan Rajdev and Yash Kothari also participated in this round.

Gumlet is part of Surge’s fifth cohort of 23 companies that have developed new digital solutions to help companies and individuals live, work and learn better in a rapidly evolving Southeast Asian landscape. Business Standard