Israeli AI-powered editing solutions developer for professional photographers Imagen today announced the completion of a $30 million finance round led by Summit Partners with participation from existing investor NFX. The company saids that the new funds will be used to expand the workforce, acquisitions, further development of the company’s SaaS product, and to speed up growth.
Tel Aviv-based Imagen was founded in July 2020 by Yoav Chai, Yotam Gil, and Ron Oren to modernize and improve the post-production workflow of professional photographers by automating image editing at scale. The idea for the business originated from one of the co-founder’s months-long wait for his wedding photos. Talking to photographers, he found that while innovations in digital photography had increased the volume of images captured and stored, post-production work remained repetitive and time-consuming, estimated at almost two hours for each hour of shooting time. Because each photographer has their own unique style, the process could not be automated generically with existing tools. With backgrounds in machine learning and computer science, the Imagen team recognized the opportunity to dramatically improve this workflow.
Gil said, “We built Imagen to make photographers’ lives easier. Our AI-powered solution is designed specifically to automate the tedious aspects of post-production work, allowing each artist to maintain and evolve his or her own creative style. Imagen essentially creates time for our photographers, allowing them to focus on the artistry of their work and deliver a better experience for their customers.” Imagen’s end-to-end AI technology creates an individual profile based on a photographer’s previous work and unique style. The more photos uploaded, with more diverse scenes and lighting conditions, the better the AI can capture each editing style and accurately predict dozens of editing parameters. Imagen’s solution can save up to 90% of post-production time and turns many hours of manual work to seconds, while preserving the personal style of each user. The profile evolves and learns with the user over time, allowing better accuracy and consistency in applying each photographer’s style to new photos ingested into Imagen. After a bootstrapped beginning, the Imagen team raised a seed round in September 2021 to support hiring and continued, rapid growth. Today, Imagen is profitable and counts thousands of photographers as part of its growing user community, helping these creative professionals to provide better service for their customers, scale up their own businesses and develop their own signature style. Imagen edits more than 150 million photos annually and saves millions of hours of manual work each month for a wide range of customers, from individual photographers to big studios to other creative businesses.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on December 19, 2022.
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