By Riley Kaminer
Too many stories to tell; too little time to tell them. That is, until now – thanks to AI.
Hold your horses: We’re not talking about more LLM-generated gobbledygook (take that, ChatGPT!). Much to the contrary, this AI will help you bring out the best bits of your own writing, and help you share it with the masses.
Meet Spines, a Boynton Beach-based startup that has developed an artificial intelligence-infused platform to streamline the process of publishing a book.
And yes, despite the doom and gloom, the publishing industry actually continues to grow – it’s at $37 billion now and is on track to grow to $41 billion within three years.
Here’s the skinny on Spines: With the help of a real live production manager, Spines takes authors through a detailed editing process, it designs the book art, and it manages the formatting, and even deals with distribution by listing the book across more than 100 channels. Once the book is published, authors can leverage Spines’ suite of marketing features and royalty management tools, all of which are powered by AI (of course).
Today, the company has announced that it has raised a $6.5 million seed round to further fuel its mission to upend the staid publishing industry. Aleph led the round alongside previous investor M-Fund, best-selling Start-up Nation co-author Dan Senor, and LionTree LLC.
“This investment round represents a critical step in advancing our proven use case and rapidly expanding availability in a market in need of a tech-enabled alternative to the costly, inefficient status quo,” CEO and founder Yehuda Niv said in a statement. “We look forward to working with this group of top investors and authors as we continue our expansion amongst self-publishing, bolster our offering, and allow an increasing number of authors to focus on what they love most – telling their stories.”
Niv founded the company alongside CMO Lev David and CTO Nir Kenner. Spines has around 50 employees.
“Spines is exactly where we want to invest in AI,” says Michael Eisenberg, Equal Partner at Aleph. Eisenberg, a New York native, now primarily lives in Israel, but has been known to publicly share his admiration for the rapidly-growing Miami tech movement.
“Spines leverages all AI advances to make an old industry much more efficient, available to more customers, and better at its job,” Eisenberg continued. “As an author, I can tell you that the current book publishing process is expensive, painful, and long. Yehuda – a publisher himself – and his team are exactly the right people to bring every aspect of the book publishing process into the AI-led, fast-paced 21st century.”
Whereas a typical publishing process might take six months, publishing with Spines typically takes only two weeks, and costs about a third less. Already, Spines has made a major impact on the Israeli publishing landscape, already publishing 15% of the books in the country after having started from scratch less than a decade ago. The company hopes to follow an even more ambitious trajectory in the U.S. market.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Tech and entrepreneurship abound at the 40th annual Miami Book Fair downtown Nov. 12-19
- Storybook scores $700,000+ in funding during Miami Tech Week
- Founded by moms, Miami startup Binibi creates interactive bilingual books for kids
- 1948 Ventures is enabling investors to support Israeli dual-use startups
- Chutzpah meets hustle: Israel’s ‘Startup Nation’ connects with #MiamiTech
- Global Settlement Network raises $11M to rethink how money moves - May 15, 2026
- Albert Santalo is building what comes after vibe coding - May 14, 2026
- Propy and Milo team up so diamond-handed buyers can skip the cash-out - May 13, 2026