A Nanaimo entrepreneurial partnership has procured gold from a Dragons’ Den dragon.
Durlabh and his sister Harsangeet Sandhu, are the creators of Affichi, an app that lets the user take a photo with a cell phone or camera and print posters in “slices” on a home printer to create huge image posters, cut a deal with dragon Lane Merrifield who saw the potential of the program for children and made an offer of $125,000 for 25 per cent of Affichi. The offer was $25,000 more than what the Sandhus were asking.
The Sandhus’ pitch aired Sept. 17 on the show’s first episode for the 2018 season.
Durlabh said he is still excited about landing the offer from Merrifield that beat out a combined $100,000 offer from dragons Vincenzo Guzzo and Jim Treliving and said he wanted to do a deal with the two dragons, but Merrifield’s offer was too hard to turn down.
The idea for the app came up when Durlabh wanted to recreate a large image for his wall that he had in India, but didn’t want to go to a regular printing service to have that done, so he wrote a program that allowed him to break down the image and print it out in sections on a regular home computer printer that could be reassembled into the full-size poster.
“Then my friends saw it and they wanted it,” Durlabh said.
Affichi’s app is free, but the company offers special printing papers with adhesive strips that allow app users to stick the papers together to create poster-size images and is now offering other accessories as well, such as backpack covers that photos can be inserted into to personalize the bag’s appearance.
The company has also started creating an online gallery of posters created with the app.
To learn more, visit www.affichi.com/.
RELATED: Products pitched at Dragons’ Den auditions in Nanaimo
<hr width=”75%”>
<p><a href=”mailto:photos@nanaimobulletin.com” target=”_blank”><br />photos@nanaimobulletin.com<br /><strong>Like us on <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/nanaimobulletin” target=”_blank”>Facebook</a> and follow us on <a href=”http://www.twitter.com/nanaimobulletin” target=”_blank”>Twitter</a> </strong></p>
