VMPL

New Delhi [India], September 1: Saksham Keshri and Prakash Kumar, who previously built Relevel, Unacademy's job-focused venture, are back with a new startup, Clipwise. Relevel crossed 500,000 test takers and $8 million+ in annual revenue. Before that, the duo built game-streaming platform Rheo TV, which scaled to more than 10 million users, raised $2.8 million from Lightspeed and Peak XV's Surge programme, and was later acquired by Unacademy, delivering a 1.5x cash return to its last investors in under two years. With Clipwise, they are now tackling a much larger opportunity at the intersection of AI, social media and small businesses.

Their new bet is that SMBs will increasingly use AI social media agents instead of depending on costly and often inefficient agencies, building expensive in-house teams, or stitching together multiple software products themselves. Clipwise is designed to understand what is working in a business's category, decide what should be posted, create ready-to-publish content, keep the account active and eventually learn from the performance of every post. Its initial focus includes categories such as restaurants, real estate, salons, gyms and clinics, with the US among its key early markets.

Still operating largely in stealth mode, Clipwise has already crossed 300,000 registered users while testing and refining its products, with a significant share of its early focus directed at the US. The broader SMB-focused social media agent has yet to be formally launched.

That early momentum has also brought interest from venture capital firms. Keshri and Kumar have begun conversations with potential investors, but say they are taking a deliberate approach to choosing a partner who can support the company over the long term.

'We are building for a very large international market, so this is not just about raising capital,' Keshri said. 'We are evaluating who can be the right long-term partner as we expand across the US, Europe, Latin America and other markets.'

From social media software to a social media agent

Running an active social account remains a people-heavy operation for most small businesses. Someone has to understand trends, decide what to publish, write scripts or captions, create images and videos, edit them, schedule posts and analyse the results.

Most SMBs either handle this themselves, hire an internal team or outsource the work to an agency. Each approach comes with trade-offs: doing it internally consumes the owner's time, hiring a team is expensive, while agencies are often costly and difficult to scale efficiently for smaller businesses.

Generative AI changes those economics. Language, image and video models can increasingly perform the creative work, while software can handle distribution and analyse what performs. Clipwise's thesis is that the category will evolve from software used by social media managers to AI agents capable of performing much of the role themselves.

The opportunity behind that transition is substantial. Clipwise is initially targeting SMBs across North America, the European Union, and Latin America and the Caribbean. It estimates those regions represent approximately 84.3 million businesses, corresponding to an annual social-media-management spend pool of roughly $394 billion, based on conservative assumptions around monthly spending.

Importantly, much of that budget already exists. Companies currently spend across agencies, employees, social-media management platforms, scheduling software and content-creation products. Clipwise is betting that AI can consolidate a growing portion of those fragmented activities into a single agent.

The advantage is not the underlying AI model

At the heart of Clipwise is a simple loop: find what works, create, post and learn.

The system identifies content formats performing within a particular industry, adapts them for an individual company and keeps its channels active. As connected accounts generate performance data, those signals can inform what the system recommends and creates next.

That feedback loop shapes how the company thinks about defensibility.

'We assume image, video and language models will commoditise,' Keshri said. 'Powerful models will eventually be available to everyone. What compounds is understanding what works for a particular type of business, owning the complete workflow and learning from real-world performance.'

Rather than trying to serve every vertical at once, Clipwise intends to build its intelligence one industry at a time. It can develop a playbook for restaurants, improve it as more restaurants use the product, and then apply the same model to real estate, salons, gyms, clinics and other categories. More accounts generate more performance signals, which can produce better industry playbooks and stronger recommendations.

Social media is only the starting point

The longer-term opportunity extends well beyond creating and publishing content.

Clipwise sees the social media agent as an entry point into a broader set of marketing and software needs for SMBs, including customer engagement, direct messages, lead capture, reviews and reputation management, newsletters, appointment booking, referrals and AI assistance. Multi-location businesses and franchises could eventually manage marketing and customer interactions across many locations from the same system.

The larger ambition is to build an AI operating layer for how small businesses market themselves, acquire customers and manage their digital presence.

'A restaurant owner should focus on running the restaurant, and a realtor should focus on selling homes,' Keshri said. 'Our goal is to give every small business an always-on AI agent that can take care of its social media today and a much larger part of its marketing over time.'

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