Israeli AI company Spines announced on Tuesday the completion of a $64 million funding round, consisting of $29 million in a Series A funding round and an additional $35 million raised in debt. The funding brings the company’s total investment to $86 million since its founding.
The equity financing (Series A-1) was led by Oren Zeev’s fund Zeev Ventures, with participation from venture capital funds Aleph, NordStar, M-Fund, LionTree, and angel investor Dan Senor, co-author of Start-Up Nation. The debt was raised from the American investment firm and financing platform Twelve Grow.
Spines has developed a platform that replaces traditional publishing houses and streamlines the process, time, and cost of publishing books for authors.
AI is transforming the traditional publishing industry
All that is required of authors is to upload the content of the book they wrote to the company’s platform, from which point its AI agents take the lead in publishing it. This ranges from scanning and analyzing its content to determine the genre alongside the work required for publication, through editing, proofreading, layout, and cover design, to metadata analysis to target distribution and marketing to the most suitable audience.
The platform also enables the translation of the book from English into seven additional languages, including Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, and Hebrew, to expand its target markets, with plans to expand this capability to about 20 languages.
It also enables the rapid publication of all formats: printed, digital, and audiobooks, produced using artificial voices or the author’s own voice model. The company’s AI agents, however, are not alone in the process, and editors, proofreaders, designers, and marketing and distribution experts from the company’s team are integrated at every stage as needed.
The book publishing process at Spines takes only about three to four weeks, compared to an average of about 12 to 18 months at a traditional publishing house in the US, and the direct cost to authors is estimated to save up to about 90% compared to the cost of publishing a book through a traditional publisher, before royalties.
The company’s share of author royalties is also more modest, standing at only 20% of the remuneration received by authors from sales, compared to figures from the Authors Guild in America that place the take of traditional publishers and distribution networks in the range of 75% to 90% of the retail price of the book.
Spines’s platform consolidates sales and royalty data from book distribution in one place, which is handled by the company across about 100 channels worldwide, and also allows authors to manage reader communities.
Spines was founded in 2021 by Yehuda Niv, who serves as the company’s CEO; Lev David, VP of Strategy; Nir Kanner, CTO; and Niv Ovdat, who serves as VP of Product.
In 2013, Niv founded Niv Publishing, which is one of Israel’s largest publishing houses, releasing about 1,200 titles a year and holding a market share of about 17%. The experience he gained in publishing served as the basis for founding Spines and developing the platform.
The company reports growth of about 400% over the past year, with about 8,000 American authors having published their books on its platform, and with about 400 new authors joining every month. It currently employs 350 workers, 90 of whom are employed in Israel and the rest in the US, Eastern Europe, and South America.
The global publishing market is valued at about $307 billion annually and is expected to grow year-on-year by about 3.5% to about $391 billion by 2033, according to market research firm Grand View Research. The Asia-Pacific region is the largest player in the field, holding a market share of about 42.3% due to the demand for study materials, education, and professional literature in these countries.
The international book market, however, is estimated at about $150 billion and is expected to grow at an annual rate of about 5.1% to about $224 billion by 2034, with North America leading with a share of about 35.4%, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific, according to market research and business intelligence firm Mordor Intelligence.
Yehuda Niv, founder and CEO of Spines, told Walla Money that the publishing industry in the US alone brings in about $40 billion a year, which authors are forced to pay out of pocket. Every year, about 4 million new books are published in the US, with only about 50,000 authors managing to get funding for book publication from a publishing house, while the rest are forced to spend an average of about $30,000 to $50,000 out of pocket on the process.
“The main market we are focusing on right now is the US, where about 5,000 authors begin the publishing process every day, compared to the Israeli market, which stands at about 7,000 a year,” Niv said. “The number of authors is growing, and on the other hand, the bottleneck until a book is published is tightening. Hence the great interest generated by the platform, which streamlines the publishing process for authors and significantly saves them costs and the time it takes for a book to come out.”
“Alongside this, our goal is to empower authors and not write books for them. Therefore, we do not run a process for AI-generated books, but exclusively for human creations. Our goal is to empower authors through technology that will shorten processes for them and lower costs without harming their unique style and voice. In addition, we are removing barriers to book publication, such as publishers acting as a sort of ‘gatekeeper’ that decides who can publish a book and who cannot. I believe every story, idea, or knowledge should find expression and be made public.”
‘Innovative technology can transform an established market’
Oren Zeev, founder of Zeev Ventures, said that this is exactly what he looks for in entrepreneurs. “I was one of the early investors in Audible and saw how innovative technology can change an old-school market in the world of books. I think Spines has the opportunity to make a similar change in the way books are published.”
Michael Eisenberg, co-founder at Aleph: “As someone who has written and published nine books, I am well acquainted with the path that begins after you finish the manuscript. It is a long, expensive, and complex process that requires working with many professionals. When we invested in the company in the seed round, we saw an opportunity to use AI to make this process fast, efficient, and accessible to many. The company’s growth since then shows that there is a real demand for this. In my view, the big opportunity is to open up the publishing world to more people, to more interesting voices, and original ideas.”