Israel-based publishing platform Spines has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round. Spines has developed an all-encompassing AI publishing platform that works under the guidance of a production manager. The company also has a US office in Florida, which is currently quite active.
The funding round was supervised by Aleph, which is a New York-based financial services firm, along with previous investors M-Fund, LionTree, and also Dan Senor, who is the coauthor of the bestseller Start-Up Nation.
Spines founder Niv said that the traditional status quo is inefficient and the market needed an alternate tech-based solution, and that their funding round is an important step for expanding their already proven practical use cases and their widening market presence.
AI Publishing platform, Spines features
Spines offer extensive features for book designing and publishing, as it creates over 70 versions of the front, back, and spine to choose from. As said above, the system works under the supervision of a production manager, so an author can decide during any stage of the process if he or she wants to seek the assistance of a human expert.
It is said that the Spines platform cuts down publishing costs by 30% and it also lowers the publishing time from six months to two weeks because it provides an extensive suite of services to authors.
Spines also lists the book on more than one hundred channels, and it optimizes metadata automatically with the help of its AI capabilities. Once the book goes live, users are provided with additional options for distribution, marketing, and royalty management, which are managed by artificial intelligence.
Increased publications in the future
The current valuation of the publishing industry is around $37 billion, and it is expected to rise to $41 billion by 2027. There are usually few opportunities for self-publishing authors for monetization and marketing, as the sector’s practices are still largely traditional and analog.
By the end of this year, Spines is aiming to increase its publications and publish nine books per day, which will be around 3000 books in 2024, while during the last year, it published 500 books altogether.
The Spines process is quite straightforward, the author is required to upload his transcript, and they will get their book optimized and published in two weeks time, and it will be accessible to readers across the globe.
Aleph Partner Michael Eisenberg said that Spines is a good option for investment where they look to invest in AI. As an author, he also said,
“I can tell you that the current book publishing process is expensive, painful, and long.”
Source: Refreshmiami.
According to him, Spines has the potential to make the traditional publishing sector much better by being available to more customers and by being efficient. Another investor, Lior Elkan, M-Fund Managing Partner, also showed his confidence in Spines, as, according to him, Spines founder and CEO shared an aspiring vision with them regarding the publishing sector’s potential, it was before the ChatGPT launch and is often an area ignored by traditional venture capitalists.
The original story can be seen here.
