A startup using artificial intelligence to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production work has raised $30 million. The new capital will be used to expand the startup's software-as-a-service offering through mergers and acquisitions.
As investors grow more bullish on the use of artificial intelligence for generating and editing artwork, Imagen's success comes as a result. Cupixel, which uses artificial intelligence to create outlines of photos for art, raised $5 million. Runway ML, which is developing an artificial intelligence-powered creative suite for artists, made $50 million in December.
Gil, Ron Oren and Yoav Chai were inspired by Chai's experience waiting months for his wedding photos to start co-founding imagen. Post-production is a big pain point in the industry according to the co- founders. The process isn't easy to automate because each photographer has their own style
The solution they came up with was called Imagen, and it aims to learn a photographer's personal style from around 3000 samples of their previous work. Machine learning is used to try to capture editing styles and predict dozens of different editing parameters, taking around a half-second to complete.
The user interface for Adobe Lightroom is provided by imagenai. The image is called imagenai.
As Imagen processes photos in different scenes and lighting conditions, the editing profiles evolve and become more personalized. He said that the platform ingests more than 150 million photos every year.
Over time, imagen profiles evolve and learn with the user, allowing better accuracy and consistency in applying each photographer's style to new photos. It is possible for a photographer to benefit from time and cost savings while maintaining quality.
Pretrained profiles, called Talent Artificial Intelligence Profiles, are based on the editing styles of industry leading photographers. Gil says that they test their photos on a large database to make sure they produce consistent results.
Gil said that before Imagen, photographers could either manually edit or hire an editing service, which was expensive, took a long time, and didn't offer a guarantee on the results. The need for multiple professional photo editors to process a brand's visual assets is eliminated with the use of imagen.
According to Gil, Imagen has more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue. The company plans to launch a product that will identify the best photos from a photoshoot and a local adjustments tool to apply different editing adjustments.
Gil admits that Adobe has a number of artificial intelligence image editing tools in its products. He thinks that none are as personalized as Imagen.
The image is called imagenai.
The ability to modify editing to each photo based on the photo's characteristics gives a huge value to the user. Photographers can improve their earning potential by using more time to shoot and less time to edit with Imagen. As inflation and macroeconomic trends affect personal spending on events like weddings, and enterprise budgets for things like advertising campaigns, efficiency will be even more important to achieve scale.
The managing director at Summit Partners agrees.
He said that there are more than a million professional photographers out there and that many are limited by the immense burden of manual post-production work associated with each photo shoot. With growth in digital assets and increased expectations for both higher-quality and greater quantity of professional images, the imagen team has built a platform that uses proprietary, personalized machine learning technology previously not possible at scale.
The company expects to double its workforce next year.
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