Startup of the Day: Crosscreators, Georgian marketplace for AR content creators

The Tbilisi-based startup Crosscreators develops a marketplace that connects AR creators with their customers. The platform was co-founded and launched five months ago by Georgian Ani Manjavidze and Ukrainian Dmytro Farafontov. It already has 2,000 content creators, as well as 500 paying customers. 

In the Startup of the Day feature, the CEO at Crosscreaters Ani Manjavidze shares details about the startup’s idea, its product, team, and early results.

The Startup of the Day feature on AIN.Capital is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originated from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.

Tell us about your startup. How does it work?

Crosscreators develops an Augmented Reality platform to simplify AR content creation for brands. We unite the segmented AR creation process in a one-stop-shop solution for creators seeking to monetize their skills and for brands that can cost-effectively and simply get AR content either by ordering a project or buying a ready-made template, which is yet customizable.

AR content creation process gets 60% cheaper and 3x faster. We cover the whole AR landscape. Here you can get social media effects, web-based (for your websites) and application content as well.

So we make sure that at every stage of the marketing funnel, marketers and their brands get the desired and effective content that will ultimately boost their ROI.

How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?

Three years ago, I myself, being from the marketing space, decided to run a unique marketing campaign for one of the companies where I was CMO. From that point on, the struggle began. Long story short, I lost four months only for doing the simplest social media filter. Other companies also struggled. So I decided to make an agency, but it still was not a solution as:

• 8 out of 10 brands lack the resources to adopt AR;
• AR content is expensive and time-consuming (min $10,000-100,000)
• SMBs struggle to find the right creators.

The main reason Crosscreators exists is the mission of AR democratization — every marketer should have successful campaigns and access high-converting medium AR technology.

How long did it take you to reach MVP? What difficulties did you encounter?

So far, we have had two versions of the product. We started as a prototype and launched the MVP two months ago. But it is more than MVP, so we call it Alpha MVP. It took us two months to redesign our previous platform, and after that time, we have an almost perfect tool for AR creators and their clients.

When exactly did you launch your product? 

We kicked it off five months ago. Since then, we have tripled our traction, and now we have around 2,000 international creators who cover the whole AR landscape, as well as 500 paying customers.

Tell us about the startup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?

We make money through the commission business model.

What are your target markets and consumers? 

Our clients are companies, mainly B2C focused, that sell their products or services digitally. To talk more about users, they mostly come from marketing teams: either CMOs themselves or marketing or social media managers. We focus mainly on the European market, but we have clients from the USA as well.

What about your team? How many people are working for the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.

We are a team of 15 now (half Georgian and half Ukrainian).

Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment.

We have raised $300,000 altogether with governmental grants, VC and accelerator.

What’s next? Tell us about your future plans.

We are refining our product and want to scale internationally. Since we already have customers, we want to double in size in the near future.