Why We Built Bholi.ai
I'm Anubhav Pandit, and Bholi.ai is the second time I've tried to fix the same problem. The first time, I lost.
Let me tell you about both - because the failure is the more important half of the story.
It started with a simple, annoying problem
Back in November 2018, I started a company called Picnara. The idea came from something almost everyone has run into: hiring a photographer is unreasonably hard. You don't know who's good, you can't easily compare portfolios, and you end up either overpaying a big name or rolling the dice on whoever you found in a panic.
So we built a way to make it simple. A client would tell us what they needed - a wedding, an event, a shoot - and instead of dumping a hundred listings on them, we'd do the work and hand them five solid options. Five, not five hundred. Enough to choose from, not so many they'd drown. On the other side, photographers got real, qualified enquiries instead of noise.
It worked. By the end of 2019 we'd served over 20,000 clients, with more than 10,000 professional photographers registered on the platform. We were genuinely helping both sides of a relationship that had always been a little broken. I thought we'd cracked it.
Then the world stopped
You know what happened next.
COVID didn't slow event photography down. It took it to zero. No gatherings meant no events, and no events meant no photography. The few small functions that still happened came with the same refrain: nobody wanted to pay a fair rate when the celebration itself had shrunk to ten people in a living room.
A business built entirely on events had nothing left to stand on. We struggled - really struggled - for more than a year. I tried everything I could think of to keep it alive. Eventually I had to accept the thing no founder wants to: it was over. We let Picnara go.
That was a hard, quiet kind of failure. Not a dramatic one. Just months of watching something you built slowly run out of air.
What survived the failure
But here's what failure does, if you let it: it leaves you with everything you learned and none of the assumptions.
After Picnara, I couldn't stop thinking about the photographers. I'd spent years inside their world, and I knew their frustrations - not the glamorous ones, the real ones. The chasing of leads. The clients who go quiet. And the one that came up again and again, long after the shoot was done: delivery. The endless "photos kab milenge?" The galleries nobody fully looks through. The work pouring out of them but never quite landing the way it should.
Picnara had tried to help photographers get found. But I slowly realised the bigger, unsolved problem wasn't finding them - it was everything that happened after they got the job. The part where their beautiful work had to actually reach people, and usually didn't, not properly.
So the question changed. Not "how do we help clients find a photographer?" but "how do we help a photographer delight their clients - and make their own life easier while they're at it?"
Where Bholi comes in
Around the same time, I went deep into AI - I founded Blinkit-AI, a platform built to pull the scattered mess of AI models and tools into one simple place. That work taught me something I keep coming back to: most technology doesn't fail people by being weak. It fails them by being complicated. The job worth doing is almost always reducing friction - taking something tangled and making it feel effortless.
And once I was thinking that way, the answer to my old problem was obvious. That broken last step - delivery - was exactly the kind of tangle modern AI could quietly undo. Faces could be recognised. Photos could find their own people. The handoff that had frustrated photographers forever could become the best part of the job instead of the worst.
That's Bholi.ai. We chose the name on purpose - bholi means simple, honest, without pretence. After years of watching technology make people's lives more complicated, I wanted to build something that just quietly made things easier. No bloat, no buzzwords. Photos reaching the right people, fast, the way they always should have.
Why this one matters more
Picnara taught me how much photographers carry, and how little of the industry is built around making their work actually land. COVID taught me that the real thing worth protecting is the relationship - between a photographer and the people who'll treasure their work - because that's what survives even when a business doesn't.
Bholi.ai is everything I learned the hard way, finally pointed at the problem I should have been solving all along. I lost the first round. I don't intend to lose this one - because this time, I understand what the real problem always was.
