Ninthgrid bridges this gap by building a dedicated marketplace for African creators to showcase their work and earn income, while equipping design and marketing teams worldwide with culturally authentic stock images and illustrations
The Challenge
Following a period of rapid growth through ecosystem expansion and creator acquisitions, Ninthgrid was looking to achieve platform-wide operational efficiencies and brand alignment. In order to do this, they chose to focus firstly on their digital asset curation, creator onboarding, metadata standardisation, and licensing compliance functions.
Ninthgrid’s fast-paced expansion had resulted in a lack of media tagging consistency and process standardisation across their diverse range of visual collections. The numerous manual review workflows and non-transparent content ingestion pipelines were challenges Ninthgrid was keen to address.
Additionally, in the face of evolving digital copyright standards and global asset licensing requirements, Ninthgrid was eager to stay ahead of the curve in responding to these changes, whilst also maintaining the authentic cultural representation, fair creator monetization, and agility that are at the core of their DNA.
What did
BAO Digital do
Ninthgrid’s appreciation for combining cultural scale and global visual reach with high-performance tech agility made our engineering partnership an obvious choice. Our team has been working alongside Ninthgrid to support two key operational workstreams: Automated Asset Ingestion and AI Search & Metadata Migration.
Automated Asset Ingestion Delivery — We collaborated with Ninthgrid’s core engineering team to identify, design, build, test, and deploy automated content processing workflows. This pipeline automatically tags, optimizes, and categorizes high-resolution Afrocentric media upon upload, streamlining asset onboarding across creator management, content moderation, and licensing functions.
AI Search & Metadata Migration — We led the migration of Ninthgrid’s core digital asset search engine to an advanced vector-based indexing architecture. In addition to this, we implemented an intermediate API communication layer between Next.js and backend database services, ensuring real-time asset delivery, instant search response times, and a seamless licensing checkout experience for global enterprise clients.
The Results
- 30+ processes delivered
- Over 30,000 hrs delivered back to the business
- 100% SOX compliance in Settlement process automation
- >95% success rate of bot case completion
- SDK delivered for native platforms, enabling Virtual & Live agent communications across multiple mobile platforms
