How Three Founders Built Blend Into a $100K/Month AI Photo App for Sellers

Who built it, and what they built

Blend is a mobile tool that uses AI to turn a single product snapshot into ready-to-post visuals for marketplaces, social channels, and ads. Sellers upload a picture of their item and the app strips the background, picks a backdrop, and layers on copy and calls to action.

The company was started in March 2021 by Vaibhav Prakash, Jamsheed Kamardeen, and Vishwanath Kollapudi in Bangalore, India. The team has since grown to 28 people, and the founders say their mission is to give small sellers the kind of polished content that used to require a professional shoot.

Where the idea came from

The idea began when Vaibhav, who had been working on API projects, thought an app for e-commerce sellers would be worth building. He called Vishwanath, who brought in Jamsheed, and within a day the three had settled on product photography as the problem to attack.

Each founder brought a different strength. Vaibhav is described as the reserved problem-finder, Vishwanath as the outgoing public face who had seen hyper-growth at Ola and co-founded Drivojoy, and Jamsheed as a self-taught coder since age eight who became VP of Engineering at logistics startup Locus before leaving to build something of his own.

The founders say they watched traditional shopkeepers lose ground as buyers moved to large online platforms, and they wanted to level the field so smaller sellers could compete on visuals and marketing.