Startup of the Month: Draagu

CEO JOAN BARDELETTI, 41, FRANCE

Draagu is a mobile app that allows anyone around the world to sell photos taken with their smartphone. The app uses artificial intelligence and image recognition to spot a match between a company’s request for a specific image and images in a user’s phone. If a match is made, an alert is triggered and you’re asked to pick the photo you’d like to sell.

We created Draagu to help democratise image selling. Around three billion photos are taken every day, most of them with smartphones, but only 0.3 percent of them are on sale. Why? Because of the hassle associated with uploading, tagging and submitting photos to traditional image stocks. That’s where Draagu comes in: it’s an easy to use tool that helps make photos accessible for sale. Your images are never published, it’s only the final image you submit that becomes visible to the company.

We also want to provide remote communities in Asia, Africa and South America with a new means of creating additional income. We pay between €5-€50 for each photo and half of the payments we’re issuing right now go to developing countries that are not well covered by traditional image stocks. Our app is not really for big cities, which are already well documented. 

We work with a lot of tourist and media companies, as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs). With Draagu, tourist companies can source images of hotels or travel experiences from real clients. Development institutions and NGOs can use it to get images from the field they’re working in, and in turn use them to show the impact of their work in advocacy and fundraising campaigns. We’re also increasingly working with media companies, as the app allows them to reach out for images taken directly by their readers. 

I’ve been a professional photographer for over 10 years, and the co-founder Maxime is an engineer and photographer, so between us we’ve got both the engineering background as well as a passion for photography. We saw how the job market for photographers was changing and how it’s not always viable to send a professional photographer across the world to take photos of, let’s say, a street. However, there are lots of people with smartphones in their pockets that could take those photos for you.

We launched Draagu in June. We’ve since reached 42 countries and have 220,000 available images, and we’re growing by 25,000 images per week. We’ve currently got six companies working with us and we’re in talks with 10 other large corporations. The goal is to reach one million images by the end of the year and 100 million images by the end of next year. We’re also working on launching the app for iOS, as it’s currently Android-only. 

Barcelona is the perfect place to create a company like Draagu. It’s a big hub for the tech industry in Europe, there are lots of talented people, we’ve got a great quality of life, and salaries aren’t as high as in Berlin or Dublin. If I hadn’t come to Barcelona, I might not have launched Draagu.

Learn more about Draagu at draagu.com.