[ad_1]
ImagenAI, a startup that uses AI to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production tasks, announced today that it has raised $30 million in comprehensive growth investment from Summit Partners. The new capital brings Image’s total revenue to $34 million and will be used to expand the startup’s software-as-a-service offerings through mergers and acquisitions and product research and development, co-founder and CEO Yotam Gill told TechCrunch.
Image’s success comes as investors increasingly rely on AI tools to produce and edit artwork, including photography. Cupixel, an AI technology that captures images to create a list of photos for pictures or paintings, recently received $5 million. Meanwhile, Runway ML, an AI-powered creative suite for artists and major research contributor to text-to-image AI Stable Diffusion, raised $50 million in early December.
Image was co-founded in 2020 by Gill, Ron Oren (former head of SynSense’s R&D division) and Yoav Chai (former Mellanox chip designer) based on Chai’s experience waiting months to secure wedding photographs. When talking to photographers, the co-founders said they realized a major pain point in the industry: post-production is repetitive and time-consuming. Since every photographer has their own style, the process is not easy to automate with existing tools.
The solution they came up with – Eigen (not to be confused with Google Image) – aims to learn a photographer’s personal style from around 3,000 samples of their previous work. Available as a cloud-based plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic, ImagenAI lets the machine learn to model editing strategies and predict dozens of different editing parameters in half a second — and $0.05 per photo — to complete an edit.
ImagenAI user interface in Adobe Lightroom. Image Credits: ImageAI
Gill notes that Imagen’s editing profiles will evolve over time, theoretically becoming more personalized as Imagen processes photos in different scenes and lighting conditions. The platform is receiving more than 150 million photos annually for “tens of thousands” of customers worldwide, he said.
“Imagen profiles evolve and learn with the user over time, applying each photographer’s style to new photos imported into Imagen for better accuracy and consistency,” says Gill. “Any photographer who edits at scale and spends a lot of time in post-production can benefit from time and cost savings while maintaining quality.”
Image offers pre-trained profiles called Talent AI Profiles based on the unique editing techniques of “industry leading” photographers. Gill says that they were tested on a large database of photos to produce consistent results.
“Before Iman, photographers could either edit manually or outsource to an editing service, which was costly, had a long turnaround time and didn’t guarantee consistency of results,” Gill said. “Imagen democratizes professional photography from post-production, eliminating the need for multiple professional photo editors to process a brand’s visual assets, and allowing photographic assets to be quickly discovered and used.”
Gill says Egin is currently profitable, bringing in more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Identifying certain parts in photos, for example subjects, to apply various editing adjustments.
When asked about competitors (aside from manual exporting, of course), Adobe admits to one that it packs a number of AI image editing tools into its products, most notably Lightroom. But none of them are as customized or customizable as Imagen — at least not yet, he contends.
Image Credits: ImageAI
“Imagen’s ability to edit according to the user’s style and adjust each photo based on the nature of the photo provides great value to the user,” said Gill. “[With Imagen,] Photographers can improve their earning potential by creating more valuable time for shooting and less time wasted on editing. As inflation and macroeconomic trends affect personal spending on events like weddings and corporate budgets for things like advertising campaigns, efficiency becomes even more critical to achieving scale.
Stefan K. Payer, managing director at Summit Partners, unsurprisingly agrees.
“There are over a million professional photographers out there — and many more aspiring — and many of them are limited by the burden of manual post-production work associated with each photo shoot,” he said in an email. “With the growth of digital assets and increasing expectations for both high-quality and high-volume professional images, the Imagen team has built a platform that leverages proprietary and personalized machine learning technology that was previously unmatched.”
Eigen, which has 50 employees worldwide, expects to double its workforce next year.
[ad_2]
Source link