Founded in 2014 in Amsterdam, Dashmote is the brainchild of three curious rebels Adrian Alexandru, Dennis Tan, Matthaeus Schreder, and Stefan Tan, created with the goal of decoding the visual web and extracting valuable insights from images. With this, the company enable brands to get a clear picture of customers at an individual level.
Recently our founder Remco Janssen got an opportunity to meet Stefan Tan, CFO of Dashmote at Emerce eDay Scale-up Cafe — held in Amsterdam in October. While Stefan revealed a lot more about the company’s future and funding, he also had a piece of news to share.
Do check out the Digital Waves video below, to take a look at the full interview. Story continues below.
In an exclusive interview with Silicon Canals. Stefan Tan, CFO, Dashmote said, ” We take all these images and analyse them and give comprehensive information concerning market trends, different consumer insights, content performance and so forth to increase their marketing and sales.”
Consumer goods companies
Dashmote works for consumer goods companies like Heineken, Coca-cola, Philips, and more. Having said that, we predominantly focus on industries where people like to take pictures off, such as food, clothing, cosmetics.
Expanding to Shanghai!
Talking about expanding the market, Stefan said, “China’s one of the key market to grow in general, since there’s a lot of consumer growth. A few months ago, we decided to open our office in Shanghai in China, and the latest news is that we hired the head for China as well. I cannot tell the name of person yet, but we are now working to make it all figured out with our team on the ground in Shanghai so that we can serve all the clients who want to know more about the Chinese market.”
No worries about working with family!
When asked about working with his brother, Stefan added, “I think we as kids, when we grow up, actually, we’re always like, good friends. We never had fights more for longer than a day”. Moreover, he added that his brother Dennis works more on strategy and growth of the company, while he focuses on short-term things including finance and business development.
Started as stock image aggregator
“Initially, we started as stock image aggregator because while starting a data company there is a huge requirement for training data which is not easily accessible in general. So we competed directly with Google and Facebook to get the same training and made a partnership with lots of stock image companies, where we had the largest stock image database, which we used it actually as a training data set.” Furthermore, Stefan added, “At the same time, we also launched the consumer-facing product, which really made us to the speed up the process to know how we can train our algorithms.”
Raise funding when you don’t require it!
Dashmote started with VC funding of half a million euros and survived till it becomes commercial. Stefan also added that Dashmote is making the profit with good revenue (cash flow positive). Talking about funding, he said, ” We are now in a stage where we’re deciding to grow even faster. I always say you should look for funding if you don’t really need it. Because that’s where you are in the best position.” However, Stefan didn’t disclose the exact amount he is looking for.
Enterprise SaaS is our category!
The business model of Dashmote comes under the category of enterprise SaaS. He further explained, “If you sell something to an SME company and if you work with enterprises like the companies that we work for, it’s a combination of it. So I would like to call our business model an enterprise SaaS.” Moreover, there is a lot of standardisation within the platform, and clients can customise it as well. With that being said, Dashmote is also working on their own infrastructure where clients can work together with a consultancy company or Dashmote’s own platform to use most of it.
Understanding our customers is our massive strength!
According to Stefan, the significant strength of the company comes from a thorough understanding of customers. “In addition to it, we have our own strength, efficient computing and images as well. There is a huge set of data available in the market, so we try to combine our strength with available data in the market. “Hence, we are also open to partner with different companies that are maybe better in like a specific niche into the market,” he said.
At present, the company is receiving a lot of requests from various different markets. He went on adding, ” I had a call yesterday with a Japanese company or in a subsidiary of one of our clients in Japan, which require us to have better natural language processing in the Japanese language.”.
Want to make technology more accessible!
As quoted by Stefan, they want to stay with the current clients or in the range of 20 to 50 and serve them on a global basis. Currently, Dashmote has its presence in New York, Europe and in Shanghai. He also said,” I think, in the end, we want to make or technology or data available to a wider market.” In addition to it, the company want to roll it out to more companies around the world and make this technology more accessible.
When asked about future plans, Stefan wants his company to be the No.1 company in the world that should be known for using complete efficient and data intelligence. He also added, “In future, we will be in a situation where we don’t have to explain our story anymore, but people would know what we’re doing.”
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