Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of the shuttered Indian social network Koo, is betting on a different kind of social sharing with PicSee, a new app that automatically detects photos of your friends in your camera roll and prompts you to send them. The app launched Thursday on both iOS and Android, promising to solve the problem of forgotten photo sharing through AI-powered face recognition that works entirely on-device.
The photo-sharing space is getting crowded, but Mayank Bidawatka thinks he's found a gap worth filling. The co-founder of Koo, India's short-lived Twitter alternative that shut down in July 2024, launched PicSee on Thursday with a simple premise - your friends have hundreds of photos of you that you'll never see.
The app tackles what Bidawatka calls "forgotten photo sharing" through AI-powered face detection that runs entirely on your device. When you connect with friends on PicSee, the app scans your camera roll and automatically identifies photos containing their faces. If you don't manually send these photos within 24 hours, PicSee does it for you.
"I've been thinking about the problem of personal photo sharing for years now," Bidawatka told TechCrunch in an interview. "Last year, after we announced shutdown of Koo, I had time to rethink this problem and work on it again."
The timing puts PicSee into a competitive landscape where apps like Locket have found success with lockscreen sharing, Retro has built a following around photo journaling, and Yope targets private group sharing. Each is capitalizing on user frustration with Instagram's increasingly curated feel.
PicSee's approach centers on privacy and automation. All face recognition processing happens on-device, photos are stored locally rather than in the cloud, and the app establishes encrypted connections when sharing. Users can review photos before they're automatically sent and even recall them after sharing, which removes the images from the recipient's device.
The company has also built in content moderation with NSFW filters and screenshot blocking, recognizing the sensitive nature of automatic photo sharing between friends and family members.
