The brothers José and Beatriz Martínez were not yet of age when they created a platform that put United States media in contact with photographers who covered musical and film events in Barcelona and Madrid. Some photographers who, at the beginning, were themselves, aged 17 and 13, respectively. Over time they abandoned the project until, a few years later, the brothers saw the opportunity to start it together again.
“In a phone conversation, Beatriz was complaining about how hard it was for her digital marketing agency to take product photos. She said that everything would be much easier if there was an Uber to take photographs. And that’s how I decided to return from China, where I was working, to create that photography Uber with my sister,” José Martínez remembers. The entrepreneurs founded the startup Snaps in mid-2018, when Beatriz was 26 years old and José was 30.
Snaps, for instant photos in English, “allows companies to find professional photographers throughout the Iberian Peninsula and, thanks to artificial intelligence, the client receives their photos already edited in 24 hours,” explains the co-founder. Furthermore, “since the Covid pandemic we developed a tool that uses generative artificial intelligence to, for example, put a background on an image of a bag,” adds José Martínez, who hopes to start offering this new solution before the year ends.
The startup, which has its headquarters in Barcelona and employs 16 people, has a network of more than 8,000 photographers and a portfolio of 1,100 clients in Spain and more than 200 in Portugal. Among the user companies, Idealista, Levi’s, Century 21 and Vichy Catalán stand out. Last year, Snaps had a turnover of 1.3 million euros, a figure that the co-founders plan to increase to around 2 million in 2023. Currently, Snaps is part of Awesome Lab, the innovation program of Desigual and Wayra (Telefónica ).
