Touchtalent

Touchtalent positioned itself as a global, community-based platform for creative individuals, including artists, designers, musicians, and photographers. The company was incorporated in April 2012 by Ankit Prasad and Mohd Wassem. The pair met at IIT Delhi, and the business was initially launched from Prasad's hostel room while he was still a student. Prasad's background in technology and entrepreneurship, having started his first profitable tech venture at 16 and later dropping out of IIT Delhi to pursue his ambitions, complemented Wassem's corporate and consulting experience.

The platform's core function was to enable creative professionals and amateurs to showcase their work, receive feedback, and connect with a global audience. It supported a wide array of creative fields, such as painting, photography, digital art, music, and literature, across visual, audio, video, and text formats. A key objective was to provide creators with global visibility, secure storage for their content, and tools that respected their copyright ownership. The user base grew to include creators from over 192 countries, establishing it as a significant creative community, particularly in the Indian Sub-Continent and expanding into Southeast Asia, the US, and Europe.

Touchtalent's business model included monetization opportunities for its users. In early 2013, the company launched a "creative shop," an e-commerce feature that allowed artists to sell their artwork directly to a global audience. The platform facilitated these transactions by holding payments until the buyer confirmed receipt of the product, ensuring a secure process for both parties. By June 2014, the company was also exploring a premium subscription model for revenue. The firm secured a total of approximately $740,000 in funding over two rounds. A significant seed round of $700,000 in June 2014 was led by SAIF Partners (now Elevation Capital) and included a notable list of angel investors like the founders of Flipkart and MakeMyTrip, facilitated through the LetsVenture platform. These funds were earmarked for team expansion, product development, and geographic growth. Subsequently, both founders, Ankit Prasad and Mohd Wassem, went on to establish another venture, Bobble AI.

Keywords: creative community, artist platform, digital art showcase, photography portfolio, content monetization, creator economy, Ankit Prasad, Mohd Wassem, social network for artists, art marketplace, creative talent, Indian startup, design community, music sharing, online portfolio, visual arts, creative professionals, user-generated content, SAIF Partners, LetsVenture