According to a recently published study, the Global Influencer Marketing Platform market is projected to grow at 30.8% CAGR to reach $90.2 billion by 2030 from $8.4 billion in 2021. While social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest are the biggest platforms available for this kind of e-commerce, there are other players, like Whatnot, who are making their presence felt in the market.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What year did you get funding?
Anand Mahurkar: Late 2017.
Sramana Mitra: This was after how long from founding?
Anand Mahurkar: About six years.
Sramana Mitra: You had substantial revenue already?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Did you learn that there was this segment that has this need in the shipping segment?
Tom Walker: Port and port security. The problem at that time was there were so many industries that we knew could use it. I’ll give you an example from the insurance industry. A storm comes through an area and they’re sending inspectors to walk around and assess the damage. We knew that we could put a drone out and capture all of this in high resolution. We just knew the insurance industry was going to embrace us.
>>>Sramana Mitra: In launching this company, did you bootstrap? How did you get the company off the ground?
Anand Mahurkar: It was bootstrapped. I had a $10,000 bank account. Probably we are the only enterprise AI company that is profitable and revenue-making with no debt. I bootstrapped all these years. I got my first customer six months after starting the business.
Sramana Mitra: You wrote the software and you sold the software?
>>>According to the US Department of Commerce, e-commerce sales in the US grew 14.7% to $870 billion in 2021. The global e-commerce sales are expected to grow at 14.7% from 2020-2027. The industry is attracting a slew of entrepreneurs looking to cash in on this growth, resulting in the creation of several unicorn players.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Tell us how the side project turned into a business.
Tom Walker: I’ll tell you a funny story along the way. We had some people join the organization as volunteers. A retired CIO from a large company came on board. We were trying to build something, but we didn’t know what it was. We called it DART – Drone-Assisted Response Team. We were going to launch on Monday.
>>>According to a report published earlier this year, the e-commerce market in Europe is expected to grow 7.3% annually to $363 billion by 2027 from $481 billion in 2022. The recent pandemic has accelerated the demand for e-commerce across various sectors. Supply chain issues have accelerated the demand, and values for used cars. One such player, benefitting from this growth, is UK-based Motorway, which entered the Unicorn club recently.
>>>Evan Zimmerman, Chairman of Jovono, discusses his fund’s investment philosophy, especially around pre-seed and seed.
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