Do you work with large digital libraries? Do you collaborate on a project with your colleagues and find it tiresome to manage the work on different platforms? Check out pics.io to make your work easier. It allows you to keep your entire media library in one place.
pics.io has two co-founders aboard: Yevgeniy Shpika (CEO) and Vlad Tsepelev (CTO). They both had more than 10 years of experience in software development before starting their company. Right before pics.io Vlad and Yevgeniy worked for McKesson on mission critical solutions for cardiology.
“We worked on solutions for cardiology, in particular a PACS system. It allows you to store, process and display medical images from different procedures like X-Ray, tomography, radiography, etc. The images are mainly in DICOM format, which is really outdated and hard to read. Actually, you couldn’t see the image without special software in most of the cases. So, during the spring of 2012 I was wondering if it was really possible to teach ordinary internet browsers, like Google Chrome, to open a DICOM files. I asked our digital imaging specialist if it was possible. They replied: “No! Absolutely no!”. In a couple of weeks, I had a library that allowed us to do so,” says Yevgeniy Shpika, pics.io CEO.
After an extensive research, the project was scaled and Yevgeniy Shpika found a much bigger market where the same problem exists. In photography there’s a number of proprietary formats like .cr2(Canon), .nef (Nikon), etc. that can only be read by professional software. A month later, Shpika had a proof of concept that he could solve the problem and found a co-founder.
Together, they created pics.io, the startup’s flagship product. It does Digital Asset Management (DAM), which allows you to access large data libraries. It’s extremely effective if you’re working in a group of people; your team can leave comments with visual marks and get notifications via email and Slack. It’s build on top of Google Drive, so it’s secure and offers unlimited storage. Thanks to pics.io you can access your database quickly and you don’t have to worry about complex setups.
pics.io saves about 90% of a budget dedicated to DAM solutions and it opens totally new markets for example among educational institutions. It’s hardly possible for a college to spend $100K/yr. for a DAM system. Pics.io does the same for as little as $1K, in most cases. It’s a great budget solution for small online retailers or small digital/brand agencies. It also allows you to utilise services you’ve already purchased much better. You don’t have to worry about pics.io locking you in; you can stop using it at any moment and still keep all your files on Google Drive.
“The slogan of our company is Support your passion and this is what we’re trying to do in any possible way. We’re working to help people deal with digital assets like photos, videos, audio files and even fonts or presentations. We have a number of products to do so,” says Yevgeniy Shpika, pics.io CEO.
Besides pics.io, the startup has also created raw.pics.io. It allows the client to open proprietary photo formats like Canon’s .cr2 or Nikon’s .nef right in an internet browser without any additional software. Unlike other solutions, raw.pics.io doesn’t send your file to the internet; it does all the work right inside your browser. It’s fast and absolutely secure; it doesn’t require any additional installations or plugins. Pics.io’s solutions make a very complementary set: edit.pics.io, a basic photo editor, and live.pics.io, a programme that lets you Share high-quality photos with other people right in the browser window with your own audio commentary.
pics.io are continually upgrading their products. They’ve just started global redesign of the raw.pics.io converter which should be implemented by the end of the month. Shpika says it’ll be even better, faster and more convenient. Pics.io will add more functionalities requested by the clients so you can have a direct input into the programme and get exactly the features you’re missing. The founders are working on the product roadmap along with their clients.
Pics.io got about $125K of angel investment in the middle of 2013 and a $30K grant from the Global Technology Foundation fund. They hit a rough patch in 2015, when the geopolitical situation made it hard to find new investors, but they broke through and the company’s been profitable ever since. Right now, they’re servicing about 120,000 users monthly, with the user base growing monthly from 5% to 20%, depending on a season.
