Months after the shutdown of homegrown social media platform Koo, its cofounder Mayank Bidawatka is making a comeback with a new consumer tech bet, an AI-driven photo-sharing app called PicSee, which promises to make exchanging photos between friends automatic, secure, and consent-driven.
Developed by Billion Hearts Software Technologies, Bidawatka’s new Bengaluru-based startup, backed by Blume Ventures, General Catalyst, and Athera Venture Partners, PicSee positions itself as the world’s first AI-enabled mutual photo-sharing app. It seeks to solve what Bidawatka calls “the biggest unsolved problem in smartphone photography”, the millions of personal photos that remain trapped on people’s devices and rarely get shared.
“There are over 15 trillion photos in the world, with 2 trillion more clicked every year — yet most never get shared,” Bidawatka said. “PicSee fixes this with a patent-pending mutual sharing flow, you get your unseen pics from friends, and for them to get theirs, they share yours.”
At the core of PicSee’s model is what it calls a “give to get” sharing loop; users automatically receive photos of themselves, but only when they agree to share their own in return. Once two users approve each other, PicSee’s AI-based facial recognition detects new photos and identifies who’s in them, allowing the exchange to happen seamlessly in the background.
Each user gets a 24-hour review window to approve or retract any image before it’s sent, ensuring full consent. The app thus enables what the company describes as a “no-effort photo exchange”, contrasting itself with manual-sharing tools like WhatsApp, Google Photos, or iCloud.
Soft-launched in July 2025, PicSee has reportedly seen strong organic growth through word-of-mouth rather than paid promotions. The company claims users across 27 countries and 160 cities, with adoption growing 75-fold in two months. More than 150,000 photos have already been exchanged on the platform, and around 30% of users now have more photos of themselves on PicSee than in their own galleries.
Founded in late 2024, months after Koo’s shutdown following failed acquisition talks, Billion Hearts Software Technologies operates with a lean 11-member team and has raised $4 million in seed funding from marquee investors and angels from Flipkart, Myntra, Ola, InMobi, and redBus. Bidawatka said the company’s focus is now on building “privacy-safe, globally scalable consumer AI products”, with PicSee as its first flagship product.
