Spines raises 6.5M for AI-driven platform to upend hundred-year-old publishing process

The round was led by Aleph and included participation by best-selling “Startup Nation” co-author Dan Senor, LionTree LLC, and M-Fund. The platform will see more titles go live than any other publisher by year’s end while reducing costs by 30% and time to market from months to weeks.

Spines, the world’s first comprehensive AI publishing platform, announced today a $6.5M Seed round 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. 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.

“Spines is exactly where we want to invest in AI,” says Michael Eisenberg, Equal Partner at Aleph. “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.”

“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,” said Yehuda Niv, CEO and founder of Spines. “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.”

“Spines aims to be the largest publishing platform,” said Lior Elkan, Managing Partner at M-Fund. “Long before  ChatGPT launched, Yehuda presented us an ambitious vision for the huge market of publishing, an area where traditional VCs overlooked.”.

Credit: Tal Ben Hur