Spines, the world’s first comprehensive AI publishing platform, secures $6.5million in funding led by Aleph with participation from previous investor M-Fund, best-selling “Startup Nation” Co-Author Dan Senor and LionTree LLC.
The funding comes as the publishing industry, valued at 37B today and projected to grow to 41B by 2027, remains primarily analog and offers few options to self-publishing authors.
When those authors do manage to publish, few can even cross the minimum threshold to monetize their book, and few still have the time, money, or expertise to run marketing campaigns that could make their books bestsellers.
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The Spines platform reduces publishing time from six months to two weeks while reducing costs by 30% and offering a suite of services for every stage of the journey.
Spine’s AI, under the guidance of a production manager, undertakes a detailed editing process, designs the book art by creating 70+ formatted versions of the front, back, and spine for the author to choose from, and allows authors to decide when they would like to upgrade to a human at any part of the process.
Beyond putting the book together, Spines also ensures it has the highest chances of success by automating the metadata optimization process and listing the book across 100+ channels. After the book is live, the platform provides users additional options for AI-driven marketing features, royalty management, and distribution.
Using an AI-driven strategy, Spines Founder Yehuda Niv went from an unknown upstart to publishing 15% of the books in Israel within a decade and is poised to surpass that percentage more quickly in the US with the new platform.
Last year, Spines published over 500 titles and plans to publish a total of 3,000 new titles by the end of this year. That rate compares to an approximately 9-per-day average of top publishers.
Funds from this round will be utilized to enhance brand awareness, streamline the publishing process for even more authors, and continue improving the product itself.
Michael Eisenberg, Equal Partner at Aleph said, “Spines is exactly where we want to invest in AI, Spines leverages all AI advances to make an old industry much more efficient, available to more customers, and better at its job. As an author, I can tell you that the current book publishing process is expensive, painful, and long. Yehuda – a publisher himself – and his team are exactly the right people to bring every aspect of the book publishing process into the AI-led, fast-paced 21st century.”
Yehuda Niv, CEO and founder of Spines said, “This investment round represents a critical step in advancing our proven use case and rapidly expanding availability in a market in need of a tech-enabled alternative to the costly, inefficient status quo, We look forward to working with this group of top investors and authors as we continue our expansion amongst self-publishing, bolster our offering, and allow an increasing number of authors to focus on what they love most – telling their stories.”
Lior Elkan, Managing Partner at M-Fund said , “Spines aims to be the largest publishing platform, Long before ChatGPT launched, Yehuda presented us an ambitious vision for the huge market of publishing, an area where traditional VCs overlooked.”.
About Spines
Spines is the only comprehensive AI-powered publishing platform simplifying the authorship journey so writers can focus on what they do best – telling great stories. The Spines platform revolutionizes every aspect of the publishing process, from editing, proofreading, and formatting to cover design, distribution, and marketing.
Authors simply need to upload their manuscripts, and within two weeks, they will be able to see their books published, optimized, and available to readers globally.
