Mobigraph’s QUGO Designed For "Personalized Expression”, Offering Expressive and Emotionally Instant Messages

Mobigraph Solutions is a new startup, focused on creating software products for Mobility devices, founded in July 2012 by Uday Kadirvel, Siddhartha Vinnakote, Subrahmanyam A S & Sujith Kumar C R.

The Founders are known to be experts in graphic software and visual design solutions for the mobile and handheld device industry, with proven success stories in building graphics products for tier one mobile OEMs.

The startup believes that the technology which is built by them is a game changer in the global “emoji” market and it has got all potential to disrupt the emoji market.

About The Product

QUGO is designed with the purpose of "personalized expression”, offering expressive and emotionally engaging instant messaging experience. Users get to personalize a 3d avatar to create their virtual look-alike by choosing from a wide range of features, accessories, and colours. Once they create an avatar that reflects their personality, they can chat with their friend’s avatars using their avatar animations.

These avatar animations embody both facial expression and body language, which are designed and executed in a 3-dimensional space making them closer to real life. Many more exciting features are planned, with more personalization, each with the sole aim of enabling the users to express more and pushing the boundaries of expressiveness in a chat app.

What you see in QUGO is core idea of the emotional communication, and there are lot more expressive features which are yet to be realized using their technology.

The beauty of the innovation is that they can integrate this emotional/expression system onto any other app/product that needs emotional bonding and engagement with its users.

Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Mobigraph Team And Spoke to them

Story Behind

Being experts in mobile graphics software, we were wondering why wasn’t the power of graphics was leveraged in digital communication (mainly texting). We saw conversion were highly textual and emotionally bankrupt. We started our journey nearly 3.5 years earlier (31.07.2012) with a vision to enable people to express, emote and enrich like never before on mobile devices.

We faced all kinds of hurdles like patent, technology, people, art/design etc. to even get the experience right as we had to iterate and build everything from scratch to deliver this experience. We had to file a patent to protect ourselves because avatars are popular for big tech giants to patent. Getting the complex idea involving storytelling, highly technical 3D production system, human emotions, instant communication etc. onto mobile without compromising the experience and also to be efficient in battery consumption, size, data etc. was quite a challenge.

By July 2014, we launched our beta and then we started our actual operations to make the product with our full potential.

The Startup was in stealth mode for three years, since inception for the R&D of the product. We have started our marketing recently and we are seeing an encouraging response from users. We believe the technology what we have built is a game changer in the global “emoji” market and it has got all potential to disrupt the emoji market.

Idea Generation of QUGO

The idea what we had on paper was complex involving 3d content, human emotions and messaging. Making all these 3 things to come together to deliver a “real life like” experience which would emotionally engage with the user was the biggest challenge. To deliver the envisioned experience, existing 3d SDKs did not come handy, because they lack “instant” characteristics. Generally existing 3D SDKs are huge in size and slow in loading. They cannot be used to deliver the “instant” animated emotions. This led us to create a new 3D format with our own 3D expression engine to deliver the optimal experience. 

With our engine, there is almost no overhead for users in terms of battery and data usage. With this technology, we realized our first product in the market, Qugo which brings unparalleled expressiveness to instant messaging with highly personalized avatars and lively animations.

Funding And Traction Details

Due to investor interests, we are not in a position to disclose the actual money raised. We had raised money from angels in Silicon Valley. Raised funds are primarily used for Product development and R&D. We are in active discussions with VCs in Silicon Valley to raise Series A.

We have around 4000~5000 MAU. A normal user who sends an animation spends around on average 12 minutes per day and our super users spends roughly around 30 mins per day. Emoji market is heating up very fast and we believe we are in right place at the right time.

Challenges Faced

There are a couple of big technology challenges which we would like to mention. Getting the emotional experience right on the mobile device was difficult. The emotions are to be delivered instantly without any delay. To do that we ended up creating a new 3D engine for delivering fast and smooth experience, with almost negligible overhead on battery and data usage.

The second problem was how can we scale the 3D production. These emotions what you see are 3D content. 3D content comes with high cost and time. As we created more content, we understood without a production system it is extremely hard to create emotions and scale the production. We focused on creating a 3D production pipeline which was challenging and time-consuming.

Monetization Model And Marketing Plans

Our main revenue stream would be through non-intrusive ad placement. Our emotional content gives a great opportunity for brands to connect emotionally with its users. We are also looking at partnerships with say like sports franchise etc. where fans express during or after the game.

We have been focusing on organic growth until now and we are looking for partnerships for user acquisition. Integrate the technology with other apps and convert them as QUGO users.

Market Size & Opportunity

Mobile phone messaging apps will be used by more than 1.4 billion consumers in 2015, up 31.6% on the previous year according to eMarketer’s first-ever worldwide forecast for these services. Worldwide, that means 75% of smartphone users will use an over-the-top (OTT) mobile messaging app at least once a month in 2015.