Denmark-based Jumpstory has received $1 million in seed funding. The stock photography platform seeks to differentiate itself from incumbents including Unsplash, Shutterstock, and Getty Images by delivering fundamentally different imagery, that according to the company, outperforms its competitors in terms of number of click and read time on pages.
The new capital will be used to up the team size and continue the company’s global expansion efforts, Since 2018, Jumpstory has raised $3 million.
Having been both a buyer and a seller on stock imagery sites, I can personally attest to the, shall we say, sometimes-less-than-simple process it can be. Say nothing of the, well I’ll be blunt, often mountains of crap you have to sift through to find something even remotely suitable for your needs.
These two pain points are precisely the raison d'être behind serial entrepreneurs Jonathan Low and Anders Thiim’s Jumpstory. Let’s talk pricing first.
With a number of stock image houses, pricing works on a sliding scale. Where do you want to use the image? Audiobook cover? Glossy magazine front cover? In what geographic area(s) will the image appear? For how long? Print or web, or both? And on and on and on.
With Jumpstory, the convoluted process is removed by one international standard license, with subscribers having access to an unlimited number of downloads per month for as little as $29 a month. Bing, bang, done.
And now for the coup de grâce, an AI-powered search engine that guarantees to not only deliver images that users are truly searching for but stand apart from ‘the others’.
In fact, according to the Jumpstory FAQ, “We’re never charging you to download any content, but you’re paying a small monthly subscription fee to use our smart search engine and get access to our many other clever tools …”
Jumpstory’s offer has clearly struck a chord, as co-founder Low informed me that last year alone, the company grew 230 percent, and now counts customers including APSIS, SEMrush, and Computerworld in over 150 countries around the globe, with the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK being its biggest markets.
The latest funding round saw Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson and Joergen Bardenfleth – former Scandinavian CEO at Microsoft join Jumpstory’s cap table.
As a point of reference, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invested in Heinemeier Hansson’s 37Signals, makers of Basecamp, and so he brings not only financial backing to the table but also a valuable black book of connections.
“We’re super proud and excited that David has decided to jump on board. We want to change the world of stock photos and make it much more simple, transparent and authentic,” concluded Low.
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