Text Mercato
Text Mercato is a Bengaluru-based content writing, localisation and e-commerce cataloguing company, legally Text Mercato Solutions Private Limited. Founded in 2015 by Kiran Ramakrishna and Subhajit Mukherjee, it began as a content solutions provider operating a managed marketplace of writers and editors, and evolved into a content technology company whose cataloguing platform, launched as Rubick.ai, automated product listings for marketplaces and brands. The company is regularly cited in Indian start-up coverage for its funding rounds, its claim to process more than a million content pieces or stock-keeping units a month, and its client work for leading e-commerce companies. Its business later traded under the Rubick.ai name, described by its investors as the erstwhile Text Mercato.
Foundation in Bengaluru in 2015
Text Mercato was founded in 2015 in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Its founders, Kiran Ramakrishna and Subhajit Mukherjee, had been based in London and Paris respectively, working for international brands, when they identified a growing need for content and cataloguing in the Indian market and decided to apply their international experience in India, according to the company's funding announcements. A YourStory profile of the company's participation in a Korean start-up programme also named Nanda Kishore among the founding team. The venture started as a content solutions provider: businesses with more products and pages than they could write themselves needed product descriptions, articles and marketing copy produced consistently, at volume and to a deadline. Bengaluru, India's principal technology and e-commerce hub, placed the young company close to the marketplaces, fashion and consumer platforms that became its core customers.
The Managed Marketplace Model
The company's original model, reflected in this directory's description of the firm, was a managed marketplace connecting client briefs with vetted writers and editors. Unlike an open freelance platform, a managed model means the company takes responsibility for the finished work: it assigns writers, applies editorial checks and delivers content in the client's required format. Text Mercato publicised a seventeen-point quality check, including plagiarism and duplication checks, applied to content before delivery. Its platform could check keywords, plagiarism and word count and manage content structure, and its service reporting covered measures such as content rating and language quality. Reports on the company put its writer community at more than 3,000 writers alongside a core team of around forty employees at the time of its Korean programme profile, a ratio typical of marketplace businesses in which a small staff manages a large distributed supply of specialists.
From Content Provider to Content Technology Company
Text Mercato's defining strategic shift was from supplying writing to building technology around cataloguing, the process of creating and maintaining the product listings through which goods are sold online. Its proprietary tools combined machine learning models such as image recognition and data extraction with workflow software and a programmable content management system, intended to make cataloguing faster, better and more cost-efficient. The founders argued that the catalogue is the base on which digital selling happens, affecting discoverability and customer experience, and that the multi-department, multi-role process of listing and marketing a product could be unified into a single flow with central management and scale across languages. By the time of its later profiles, the company described itself as having transformed from a content provider into a content technology company with more than 276 clients and varied products in the content and cataloguing domain.
Cataloguing, Clients and Scale
The company's cataloguing work served online marketplaces, brands and sellers that needed large numbers of accurate listings. Reports at different stages named more than 100 clients in 2020 and more than fifty large brands in 2022, including Myntra, Nykaa, the Dubai-based The Luxury Closet, Webedia France and Live Auctioneers in the United States, with Amazon and Flipkart appearing in its investor's later client summary. Client sectors spanned fashion, electronics, fast-moving consumer goods, hospitality, travel and real estate. The company said it generated or processed more than one million content pieces, and later more than one million stock-keeping units, every month, and reported a threefold increase in revenue in the financial year before its 2022 funding round. At that time about sixteen per cent of revenue came from global markets including the United States, the United Arab Emirates and France, with domestic customers accounting for the majority, and the company aimed to lift the international share to thirty per cent or more.
Localisation and Multilingual Content
Language was built into the company's proposition from the start. This directory records Text Mercato as supplying articles, product content and multilingual copy to businesses and publishers, and the company's own descriptions of its cataloguing stack included translation at scale among its artificial intelligence products, alongside data sourcing and management, photo sourcing and automation, text recognition and text generation. For e-commerce clients selling across India and internationally, the same product may need listings in several languages and in formats adapted to different marketplaces. A content company that combined human writers with machine translation, recognition and generation tools could therefore offer catalogue production as a system rather than as individual writing assignments, which is the direction the Indian content industry as a whole took during this period.
Funding: Early Round in 2020
Text Mercato raised Rs 4.85 crore in a funding round reported in August 2020, led by 1Crowd, a Mumbai-based early-stage venture investment platform, with participation from the Hong Kong-based accelerator Betatron Venture Group and angel investors Andrew Dell, a former head of HSBC Africa, and Raaj Shah, chief financial officer of Sequent Software. Reports of the round described a digital cataloguing start-up serving e-commerce platforms and set out its ambition to simplify listing and marketing into one seamless process using end-to-end technology stacks and scale across languages. The round established 1Crowd as the company's lead institutional backer, a relationship that continued into its next and larger raise.
The 2022 Pre-Series A Round and Rubick.ai
In 2022 Text Mercato raised 2.6 million dollars, about twenty crore rupees, in a pre-Series A round led by 1Crowd, Mount Judi Ventures and United States-based Innospark Ventures, with participation from Modulor Capital, Tremis Capital and ah! Ventures. The company said the round took its total investment raised to more than four million dollars and gave its early investors an exit with a return of 12.3 times their investment. The funds were earmarked to strengthen technology infrastructure and automation, add new categories, expand the company's footprint in international markets while consolidating its position in India, and launch a do-it-yourself platform named Rubick.ai, designed to provide end-to-end cataloguing for small and medium brands. Investor commentary at the time framed the opportunity in artificial intelligence terms: Innospark described the company as deploying AI to automate the traditionally manual process of online catalogue management, and 1Crowd described it as a preferred partner to leaders in Indian e-commerce in product information management, which affects discovery, sales and returns.
K-Startup Grand Challenge and International Exposure
Text Mercato was part of the K-Startup Grand Challenge 2018, an annual initiative of the Korean government that gives start-ups a global platform and support to enter Asian markets. In a YourStory account of the programme, co-founder Kiran Ramakrishna described the problem the company addressed: a lack of technology in content and cataloguing processes that involved laborious manual work while being expensive and inaccurate. Participation in the programme gave the young Bengaluru company international exposure consistent with its later revenue mix, which included clients in the United States, the United Arab Emirates and France as well as India. The episode also illustrates how Indian software and content start-ups of the period used overseas accelerator and government programmes to build credibility with enterprise clients at home.
Rebranding as Rubick.ai
The do-it-yourself platform announced in 2022 subsequently became the company's public identity. Investor Mount Judi Ventures lists the portfolio company as Rubick.ai, erstwhile Text Mercato, describing an e-commerce software business that empowers small and medium enterprises with artificial intelligence solutions to create, manage, enhance and publish product listings, with services including digital asset management, cataloguing automation, marketing intelligence and data intelligence, powering more than 250 brands and five million or more stock-keeping units. The same source records a further funding round in January 2024 from Windrose Capital, Mount Judi Ventures and existing investors, intended to strengthen technology infrastructure, add categories and expand the do-it-yourself software-as-a-service platform. Job postings under the Text Mercato name likewise described Rubick.ai as an e-commerce enablement platform specialising in product discovery, search and market intelligence, and recorded more than five million stock-keeping units catalogued for more than two hundred brands. The original legal name, Text Mercato Solutions Private Limited, continued to appear as the registered company behind Rubick.ai in start-up databases.
Significance as an Information Service
Text Mercato belongs in a directory of agencies and information services because the content it produced was functional information at industrial scale: the product descriptions, specifications and listings through which millions of Indian consumers discover and evaluate goods online. Its history traces a broader change in that industry, from human writing marketplaces competing on vetted freelancers and editorial checks, to artificial intelligence platforms competing on automation, data and integration with marketplace systems. Founded by two executives who returned from London and Paris to build in Bengaluru, funded first as a cataloguing start-up and then as an artificial intelligence company, and finally rebranded around its own platform, Text Mercato is a representative Indian content-services company of the e-commerce decade.
