Wedium is a service-based internet company with a vision to become India’s go-to wedding medium. Its customer-centric approach and focus on delivering personalized wedding experiences—powered by technology—have set it apart in the industry.
In 2016, at just 16 years old, Swapnil launched his company with a humble sum of ₹1,600—money he scraped together by selling his old textbooks. He spent it all on purchasing a domain and hosting and went on to build the website himself by learning how to code from scratch.
Started as a platform for connecting customers with service professionals in the wedding industry, such as makeup, photography and mehendi services. Bhubaneswar-based wedding services marketplace that offers services in makeup, photography, spa & beauty, mehendi, wedding decors and so on is now having its centres in more than 3 cities across Odisha. Wedium boasts of 500+ service partners and more than 10,000 customers.
An MBA dropout’s mental model
Coming from a family of service-holders that included his grandfather, father, Swapnil went into jarring change by taking entrepreneurship as a career. An MBA dropout, Swapnil used to spend over 16 hours a day during his college days juggling both his startup and studies.
In 9th standard, his fascination with meritocracy sparked a passion for quizzes and gradually ignited his entrepreneurial spirit. ‘Back in school, I came up with several startup ideas,’ Swapnil recalls, ‘but none of them really took off.’ In the beginning, he was met with nothing but failure.
Been tinkering with startup ideas ever since 9th Standard during his 12th standard he encountered a huge gap in the wedding services industry.
The grand opening
Wedding services was one space that was run by word-of-mouth and referrals from friends and family. On a surface level, it seemed like it is what it is traditionally and this system isn’t really broken.‘Once bitten twice shy’ was the mindset Swapnil carried along while building the company. Having tasted business failures already, he was looking at a really large market opportunity.
Wedding services space hasn’t seen any real solving. All internet model across the world were lead generation 1.0, sort of listing models. Nobody really imagined the quality of experience, whether it was a hit or a miss. Most people didn’t rely on the Internet.
Realisation then came that there were so many resources at disposal—directories, JustDial, Google or Facebook—but all randomly dispersed phone numbers and made people do the difficult task of searching, finding and choosing.
A new approach to customer engagement
There were concerns around transparency, diligent timings, pricing, which seemed like a plethora of broken problems for Swapnil. With the right technology and some good operational excellence, he saw that this could be a really large business. After spending enough time with customers and service professionals alike, he identified that this was a problem not only confined to the former but also the latter.
They were dependent on event managers which came with a margins game. There was no such thing as good incentives offered when a good experience is delivered.
There were constraints and inertia on both the constituents of this spectrum, which had a clear capacity for technology to arrive and disrupt with a marketplace model.
The decision-making model
As a founder, you’re constantly making decisions—some with minor impact, others with major consequences. More importantly, these are the choices you’ll have to stand by in the long haul.
Many of Swapnil’s friends often tell him that he is someone who keeps doing whatever makes him happy. He agrees with a certain comment made by a friend’s father that Swapnil constantly lives in the moment and doesn’t look too ahead to the future.
Swapnil says “I follow my heart rather than listening to my mind all the time.”
As of 2025, Wedium has successfully served over 10,000 happy customers and expanded its presence to three cities. Its commission-based business model has fueled strong market traction, but what truly sets Wedium apart is its operational excellence and unwavering accountability in delivering standardized, tech-enabled wedding services.
Swapnil proudly shares, “I’ve always been obsessed with details and delivering value—that mindset has truly helped.” He is now focused on expanding Wedium to other major cities across Odisha by 2025, with a vision to go pan-India by 2027. Meanwhile, he’s quietly working on a big surprise for customers, set to launch in 2026.
