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A few bright spots remain in the autonomous vehicle industry even amid macroeconomic headwinds that have nearly shut off the spigot of venture capital and led to further consolidation.

Helm.ai, a startup developing software designed for advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous driving and robotics, is one of them.

The Menlo Park, Calif-based startup recently raised $31 million in a Series C round led by Freeman Group, just one year after it snagged $26 million in venture funding. This latest round, which included ACVC Partners, Amplo and strategic investors Honda Motor Co., Goodyear Ventures, and Sungwoo Hitech, has pushed Helm.ai’s valuation to $431 million.

Brandon Freeman, founder of the Freeman Group, is joining the Helm.ai board of directors as part of this financing. The company has raised $78 million, to date.

Like so many other autonomous vehicle startups, Helm.ai launched to push the technology forward with a new approach. Instead of the sensors or compute, Helm.ai co-founders Tudor Achim and Vlad Voroninski took aim at the software.

Helm.ai developed software that can understand sensor data as well as a human — a goal not unlike others in the field. Its approach is the noteworthy part. Autonomous vehicle developers often rely on a combination of simulation and on-road testing, along with reams of data sets that have been annotated by humans, to train and improve the so-called “brain” of the self-driving vehicle.

Helm.ai says it has developed software that can skip those steps, which expedites the timeline and reduces costs; that lower cost also makes it particularly useful for advanced driver assistance systems. The six-year-old startup uses an unsupervised learning approach to develop software that can train neural networks without the need for large-scale fleet data, simulation or annotation. The software is also agnostic to whatever compute and sensors are used in the vehicle, allowing Helm.ai to pitch to a diverse set of customers.

Helm.ai sells its software to various OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers in the automotive industry to help them “achieve software differentiation with high-end ADAS and L4 solutions,” according to Voroninski.

“Strategically, we’ve known that our go-to-market strategy is going to be focused on high-end ADAS or for several years now; our strategy has not changed at all as a function of the recent events,” he said, referring to consolidation in the AV industry. “I’ve been basically predicting for a number of years now that the vast majority of autonomous driving companies will fail to make it to market due to outdated technological approaches and subpar business models. So it has not been a surprise to me by any means. The autonomous driving market generally has not been efficient in the last few years due to all the misplaced hype.”

Helm.ai has attracted a number of customers, although Voroninski said he couldn’t name the other customers due to non-disclosure agreements. Helm.ai has previously disclosed that Honda is a customer. The mathematician and former chief scientist at cybersecurity machine learning startup Sift Security, did say he has spent the last two years focused on commercializing the technology and securing partnerships.

The recent funding will be used to add more employees to the 50-person workforce, R&D and building out those commercial partnerships, he said.

Helm.ai snags $31M to scale its ‘unsupervised’ autonomous driving software by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Instagram is once again offering an in-app method for users to create shareable end-of-year content. The social network announced today that it’s rolling out a new Reels template that allows users to create their own 2022 Recap to share with their friends and followers.

Users can customize their 2022 Recap Reel by choosing a narrated template from artist and producer Bad Bunndy, DJ & producer DJ Khaled, rapper and producer Badshah or Stranger Things star Priah Ferguson. You can create your recap by selecting up to 14 photos to share with your friends and followers, after which they will be automatically edited into a complete Reel that you can share with your followers.

Users will start to see a new “create your 2022 recap reel’ prompt in the app’s homepage that will take them to the new template. Or, you can navigate to the Reels tab to select the 2022 recap template to get started.

Prior to 2021, Instagram users had to create their own version of an end-of-year feature where they would post their top nine images in a photo grid. But last year, Instagram rolled out a “Year in Review” feature that allowed users to select up to 10 stories to share with their followers. Instagram is now once again offering a built-in way to share personalized end-of-year content. This year, Instagram’s end-of-year recap feature is housed in Reels as opposed to Stories, which isn’t surprising given that the social network has been pivoting to video over the past year.

The launch of the new feature comes as shareable end-of-year recaps have become increasingly popular thanks to Spotify’s annual Wrapped experience that is widely shared across social media each year. Given the success of Wrapped, numerous companies have launched their own end-of-year recaps, including Apple Music, YouTube Music and Reddit.

Instagram’s new Reels template lets you create your own 2022 recap by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Monday morning it will charge Epic Games with a $520 million settlement over charges related to children’s privacy. Epic Games, which makes popular all-ages games like “Fortnite” and “Fall Guys,” allegedly violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by deploying “design tricks, known as dark patterns, to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases,” the FTC said in a press release.

The $520 million payment is divided into two settlements: the COPPA fine amounts to $275 million, which is the largest ever penalty for violating an FTC rule. The FTC also proposed that Epic should pay $245 million to refund customers for what it calls “dark patterns and billing practices.” If Epic Games pays that fine, it will be the FTC’s largest eve refund amount in a gaming case.

In addition to making it too easy for children to make online purchases, the FTC also took issue with Epic’s live text and voice communication features, which were set to be turned on by default. The FTC claims that children were exposed to harassment and abuse because of these features, especially since Epic had no way of making sure that children and adults would not be matched together in online play. According to the FTC’s press release, children have been exposed to bullying, threats, harassment and “psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide” while playing the game.

In the last two years, Epic has raised over $3 billion in venture capital, most recently at a $31.5 billion valuation. Along with Lego, whose parent company invested $1 billion, Epic Games is working on building a kid-friendly metaverse.

Epic Games has also been embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple, accusing the tech giant of anti-competitive behavior. The video game company challenged Apple’s policy that it can remove products from the iOS App Store if the app reroutes customers around paying within the app, which gives Apple a 30% cut.

FTC fines Fortnite maker Epic Games $520M over children’s privacy charges by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Today, at the Google for India event, the company made several announcements focused on healthcare content on YouTube. In particular, it is testing a feature to let users switch between multiple audio tracks in different languages. For now, this feature is only available with a set of healthcare videos with language support for English, Hindi, Marathi, and Punjabi.

Videos with multilingual audio will have an option called “Audio track” under the settings button, which will have a list of available languages for the clip. Technically, this feature could be rolled out in non-healthcare categories as well, but YouTube is currently limiting this feature to select videos.

Unfortunately, there is no visual marker in search results to identify if a video is available in multiple languages. So users will have to look for that specific option in the settings of every healthcare video in India. That’s a bummer.

What’s more, Google also announced that it’s working with a set of creators to test its dubbing product called Aloud. The product, which was originally created by the Area 120 accelerator, helps creators transcribe, translate and dub the original content in multiple languages. The company said that it is making this tool available to a “small group of healthcare providers” initially. It didn’t specify what languages Aloud is supporting at the moment.

The company also clarified that the videos with multiple language audio tracks may or may not have been created through Aloud.

“Video is a particularly effective format for sharing health information in ways that are accessible and digestible not only to a professional audience but to everyone. We want to help truly democratize important health information. And, we remain committed to working closely with experts in healthcare and investing in technologies that will enable them to create multilingual content efficiently, to reach audiences at scale,” Ishan John Chatterjee, YouTube India’s Director, said in a statement.

YouTube is also partnering with more healthcare-related organizations in India — including Narayana, Manipal, Medanta, and Shalby — to have them create content in different languages such as English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, and Bengali.

In the past few months, YouTube has rolled out multiple health-related initiatives. In September, it started to show a new panel in search results called “Personal Stories,” related to ailments like cancer and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. In October, the streaming service opened up a certification program for health-related channels in the US to get a special badge. This badge certified them as accredited health-related creators.

Apart from language and healthcare-related announcements, YouTube also launched Courses in India, which allows users to purchase a course from an educational creator and get access to ad-free videos and other materials.

YouTube is testing a feature to let users in India watch a video in multiple languages by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

WhatsApp has introduced a feature to undo the ‘Delete for Me’ action to save you from being potentially embarrassed over accidentally deleting a message only for you that you wanted to pull for everyone on the app.

The new feature, called ‘accidental delete,’ brings a five-second window to let users reverse the action of deleting messages for their own in an individual or group chat and delete them for everyone.

Users sometimes land in a situation when they accidentally tap the ‘Delete for Me’ button instead of ‘Delete for Everyone’ to delete a wrongly-sent message. The new feature aims to help users overcome those situations by getting the small window to reverse their original action.

WhatsApp said its new offering would be available to all users on Android and iPhone. It was beta tested with some Android and iOS users in August, per a report by WhatsApp features tracker WABetaInfo.

In 2017, WhatsApp introduced the ‘Delete for Everyone’ option to let users recall a message for all people in a conversation. The feature was designed to address the issue of sending messages mistakenly in individual and group chats. Although the initial rollout of the option was limited to seven minutes, WhatsApp eventually extended that time limit to up to two days and 12 hours — or 60 hours — in August this year.

WhatsApp lets you undo ‘Delete for Me’ in case you hit that button too quickly by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Revel, an NFT or “social collectibles” platform, raised $7.8 million in seed financing led by Dragonfly Capital, the startup’s CEO, Adi Sideman, exclusively told TechCrunch.

“One way to describe Revel is a cross between Instagram and Robinhood, wrapped in social game economics,” Sideman said.

Instagram is known as a social media platform while Robinhood is known as an investing and trading platform. Revel blends them both, helping consumers build a “portfolio of media [and] of the people they collect,” Sideman said. (As a side note, Instagram announced earlier this month that creators on its platform will soon be able to create their own NFTs and sell them directly to fans, both on and off the visual social network.)

Revel’s marketplace allows users to create NFTs for their followers, friends or community and also allows people to own editions of the media they like and follow, Sideman said.

“Followers have a stake in the community they participate in and that is a powerful new experience,” Sideman said. “It’s nuanced, but it’s powerful.”

And it’s not just a financial stake, he added. “I am talking about the emotional stake, the community stake, the status, the new paradigm in which people become partners of other people’s personal brands.”

The platform leverages “social game economics” through game design and simple rules to manage economic concepts like supply and demand as well as inflation, among other things, Sideman said. The core of Revel’s economy is a gameplay concept that constrains supply and asset publishing to “healthy inflation levels,” he added.

“We call it ‘Proof of Demand Minting,’ whereby anyone can mint their first collection, but only people who get collected can mint more,” Sideman noted. “We gamify it to simplify it and obfuscate economic complexities. The results are that people are trading in a marketplace, contributing to managing efficient economies, by playing a collectibles game.”

Early adopters on the platform are both web3-savvy folks as well as young people “who have more time to engage with new platforms and figure out new games,” Sideman said. The platform has also attracted content creators like Cyrus Dobre, who has nearly 10 million TikTok followers and “regularly mints his art” on the marketplace, Sideman said.

The raise included investors from Union Square Ventures, Sfermion, 6th Man Ventures, Gaingels, Wagmi Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Global Impact Ventures, Hansa Labs and Polygon, among others. The capital will be used to expand Revel’s web3 interoperability, generative and collaborative AI functionality, and social features, Sideman said.

As it stands, there isn’t a robust social media collectible ecosystem. Some marketplaces aren’t very social, like OpenSea or Magic Eden, and collectible platforms like Sorare and NBA Top Shot aren’t social media-focused, Sideman said.

“What is not here yet, and is inevitable, is that the media published on social media, by users, personal media, will all be ownable and collectible,” Sideman said. “This triggers a new breed of services, services that are part social networks, part marketplaces and part social games.”

Revel is a cross between a social network and a marketplace. It’s supposed to be a simple trading platform that’s gamified, allowing individuals to mint photos and videos as collectibles. But whether the concept will pick up among smaller creators and average people is yet to be determined.

“The everyday person won’t want to ‘buy’ your photo, but it’s more nuanced than that,” Sideman said. “The tail of the creator economy keeps getting longer … [and] we’ve created a free economy that we expect most people won’t open their wallets for. They can barter and say, ‘Give me three of these for one of those.’ In many ways, it’s a media game.” Some people can make offers with just assets, or they can offer assets plus money to get a trade, Sideman added.

There are other projects centered around individual creators in the market today — one new entrant is making particular noise — but if the genre of digital collectibles can grow despite a generally lackluster NFT market, Revel may be onto something interesting: a real use case for the blockchain.

Revel raises $7.8M to become the Instagram and Robinhood of NFT platforms by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Ever needed to read your credit card information on the phone to make a massage appointment? The process is annoying, and it makes you wonder how safe it is to give a stranger your personal details. That’s why Los Angeles-based Mangomint built a SaaS tool that strives to streamline the booking experience for the beauty industry, which includes everything from spas and massage parlors to piercing and tattoo studios.

Mangomint recently surpassed 200,000 monthly appointments across more than 1,000 locations in Canada and the U.S., spurred by user growth during the pandemic. Investors have taken notice and funded its $13 million Series A round, which was led by OpenView Venture Partners, the Boston-based VC firm known for backing companies propelled by “product-led growth”, and joined by startup300 as well as existing angels.

Mangomint’s growth in recent times is happening in tandem with the post-COVID labor shortage across developed economies. Businesses that require in-person worker attendance, like restaurants and beauty salons, have been struggling to retain staff, many of whom have quit to deal with COVID sickness, look for higher-paid jobs, or seek better work-life balance.

“Cost [of labor] is up and supply is down because people just quit,” Mangomint’s founder and CEO Daniel Lang told TechCrunch. “We are tapping into these jobs with smart automation.”

Mangomint was born out of Lang’s cross-country road trip back in 2016 after the Austrian founder sold his software development company. “No matter what city or town we went to [in the US], there were salons and spas. We ended up booking a ton of appointments, but we always had to call to book,” Lang recalled.

Lang described the current iteration of Mangomint to be “an OS for salons and spas” that automate booking, point-of-sale, employee payrolls, and customer relationship management. The intention isn’t to remove humans, Lang said, but to augment human work — a mission that has become common for a lot of workplace automation software and a friendlier message without the threat of “robots coming for human jobs.”

“All our competitors believe online booking is the only way, but at Mangomint, you will never see the word AI,” Lang added.

That’s because robots can’t carry out certain human functions, yet. For example, many customers want advice from salons on the type of service they get, so Mangomint leaves that part of the interaction on the phone. After the call, its software automatically sends a text message to the customers, who will then click on a booking link to submit their credit card information — which can be auto-filled if they have it stored on their phones.

By removing some of the most menial work, Mangomint is reducing overhead costs for businesses, Lang suggested. Many vertical SaaS providers tend to overpromise and claim to help boost revenues, “but the ugly truth is that most of [this type of software] is just tools that replace spreadsheets.”

Asked why booking for spas and salons can’t take place on an OpenTable-like, centralized platform, Lang noted that there is already “a graveyard of startups that try to be the Opentable for the beauty industry.

“If I have a trusted salon expert, why would I go through this platform that takes a fee?” asked Lang. Mangomint tries to stay in the background instead. Users can make appointments without creating a Mangomint account. And by integrating its software into the day-to-day operation of small businesses, it aims to be “invisible” so that businesses don’t even feel its existence.

Salon software Mangomint raises $13M as it booms in post-COVID labor shortage by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

It’s been a long year for Voyager Digital. After filing for bankruptcy, the crypto lender thought it would be able to return some funds to its customers by selling its assets to FTX. As you know, things haven’t been going well at FTX either. That’s why Binance.US is stepping in today and offering to buy Voyager Digital’s assets for $1.022 billion.

It all started with the default of Three Arrows Capital earlier this year. It had some large repercussions across the crypto ecosystem. In particular, Voyager Digital realized that Three Arrows Capital owed it more $650 million. It had no choice but to file for Chapter 11 as a result.

“After a review of strategic options focused on maximizing value returned to customers on an expedited timeframe, Binance.US has been selected as the highest and best bidder for our assets,” Voyager Digital said on Twitter today.

With today’s bid, Binance.US agreed to buy Voyager’s crypto portfolio for $1.002 billion. It is also spending another $20 million for other assets of “incremental value”.

Binance.US wants to return crypto to Voyager Digital’s customers. They will be able to connect to Binance.US and see some crypto assets based on their previous positions on Voyager Digital.

“Upon close of the deal, users will be able to seamlessly access their digital assets on the Binance.US platform where they will continue to receive future disbursements from the Voyager estate,” Binance.US CEO Brian Shroder said in a statement.

Of course, users will also be able to liquidate their positions and get cash. But Binance.US will likely gain new users with this deal. Some of them may start using Binance.US as their crypto exchange. Others will just sign up to withdraw their Voyager Digital funds.

Last month, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, said that its US arm would make a new bid for Voyager Digital’s assets. “Binance.US will make another bid for Voyager now, given FTX is no longer able to follow through on that commitment,” he said.

The deal hasn’t closed just yet. Due to the Chapter 11 process, there will be a court hearing on January 5, 2023. The Bankruptcy Court will decide if it approves the deal.

Binance.US to buy Voyager Digital’s assets for $1 billion by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Hot on the heels of Ledger announcing it’s working with iPod creator Tony Fadell to create its newest hardware wallet, competing hardware wallet startup Foundation Devices announced it has raised a $7 million seed round to double down on its “sovereign computing platform,” which it says is empowering its users to “reclaim their digital sovereignty.”

The company’s main product, Passport, costs $260 and looks like a mid-2000s Vertu luxury phone, but is, in fact, a hardware crypto wallet built with security and a mobile-first approach in mind.

The company is taking a novel approach to hardware wallets in that it open sources both the hardware and software for every device it releases. Yes, that means that, should you be so inclined, you can go on GitHub and look at every line of code, every component, every mechanical design and the full bill of materials — every aspect of the design of every one of its products. The company says open source is a core part of its mission and vision.

Foundation’s $7 million seed round was led by Polychain Capital (which appears to be flying the banner of crypto winter at the moment, in that, despite reportedly having more than $600 million under management, the fund seems to have spent approximately $9 on its website design).

Others participating in the round include new investors Greenfield Capital and Lightning Ventures, and a number of follow-on investments from existing investors, including Third Prime, Warburg Serres, Unpopular Ventures and Bolt. The investment was made on a SAFE note with a $35 million valuation cap. (Disclosure: Haje worked in a non-investment role as the director of portfolio at Bolt, an early investor in Foundation Devices. Bolt’s investment into Foundation was made after Haje left the VC firm.)

The company claims it has sold “thousands” of the original Passport, and in March this year launched the second version of its flagship product. TechCrunch caught up with the company’s founder and CEO, Zach Herbert, at the Baukunst Creative Technologist conference earlier this year, where he detailed a refreshing take on the future of crypto. (A recording of the talk “Not Your Computer, Not Your Keys,” is available on YouTube.)

“[The implosion of FTX] is a wake-up call around the importance of self-custody. It’s now beyond clear that storing your coins on an exchange is extremely risky. I also think it’s a wake-up call in terms of corruption and the fact that regulators are not actually protecting you. And then, it’s a wake-up call regarding the media. The mainstream media coverage of FTX has been horrible,” Herbert said in an interview with Baukunst’s Tyler Mincey, who is also a board member at Foundation. “There are accounts on Twitter giving excellent coverage of the clear, premeditated fraud that took place, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, these very respected media outlets, I don’t know how you can read their coverage. On Twitter, you can find drastically better, much less biased coverage. And people are waking up to that. But the unfortunate thing is a lot of people have lost their life savings.”

Foundation was founded in April 2020, focusing on building open source hardware and software products that provide users with a “seamless, end-to-end sovereignty experience.” The company’s focus is security-above-all, which has included some crucial choices, including manufacturing its products in the U.S. The company’s founder has very little patience or trust in overseas manufacturing.

“There’s a geopolitical imperative, and a security imperative, to manufacture in the United States. I think we’re moving toward a multipolar world and it’s only going to get crazier. I personally would never trust a device to store my bitcoin that was made in China,” Herbert said. “And I want to be on the ground at the factory myself. We manufacture in New England, and I live in the Boston area. I’m at the factory at least every couple of weeks.”

One thing is for sure: The company’s devices certainly look very different than many hardware crypto wallets out there. That was not by accident.

“We call what we’re aiming for digital deco, inspired by the visual language of art deco. We’re embracing color and ornate design. The cryptocurrency industry has focused on dark colors for some reason,” Herbert explained. “I think that’s completely wrong for our industry. I think it should be about futuristic optimism. Bitcoin is supposed to be a counter to the dystopian future, and our design should reflect that.”

And the company is picking an aggressive fight with crypto exchanges: “We strive to play a large part in empowering users to pull their bitcoin off of exchanges and achieve digital sovereignty,” Herbert told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch interviewed Herbert to get a deeper look at the company and its hopes, dreams and ambitions. We talk about the funding round, the need for open source, why self-custody is hard but necessary for crypto and much more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What makes you the perfect person to run this company?

I’m a mechanical engineer by training and I’ve been obsessed with computers since I was little. I learned about bitcoin in 2013, and it quickly grew into an all-consuming passion. At first, I was interested in the investment potential, under the thesis that bitcoin represents an ideal form of money — that its limited supply means that, as demand increases, so will bitcoin’s price. Bitcoin’s culture morphed my views. As I consumed unending amounts of bitcoin-related content, I began to understand the importance of sound money, of sovereignty, of privacy, of the need to separate money and state.

In 2017, I dropped out of Harvard Business School’s MBA program to join a Boston-based crypto company, first as head of operations and ultimately as COO. We built hardware and software, including cryptocurrency ASIC mining hardware. I couldn’t stop thinking about the stagnation in self-custody tools, especially hardware wallets. So I and some fellow teammates launched Foundation Devices in April 2020.

Personally, I feel like I have two conflicting identities. The first is as a technology executive, startup founder, engineering alum and almost-MBA. That’s my legacy professional identity. But more and more, my real identity is as a Bitcoiner, a sovereign individual. These conflicting identities are probably why Foundation has been able to achieve its success thus far, why we’ve been able to raise venture money for ideas that have historically been considered fringe and why I’m confident we’ll continue to grow and bring amazing sovereign computing products to market.

How does this fundraise unlock the next steps for the company?

Self-custody today is simply too hard for most people; it’s why so many people were hurt this year with the collapse of FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and more. Notably, we think self-custody alone is insufficient — true sovereignty requires privacy. So we’re differentiating ourselves by building expert-level privacy features into our products and making them accessible to everyday users. For example, Envoy connects to the Tor network by default, ensuring that we can’t see users’ IP addresses or know anything about their balances or identities.

Foundation raises $7M to return ‘sovereignty’ to a chaotic crypto world by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

ImagenAI, a startup using AI to help professional photographers edit photos and automate post-production work, today announced that it raised $30 million in an all-equity growth investment from Summit Partners. The new capital brings Imagen’s total raised to $34 million, and co-founder and CEO Yotam Gil tells TechCrunch that it’ll be used to expand the startup’s software-as-a-service offering through mergers and acquisitions and product research and development.

Imagen’s success comes as investors grow increasingly bullish on AI tools for generating and editing artwork, including photorealistic art. Cupixel, whose AI tech takes images to create outlines of the photo for drawings or paintings, recently raised $5 million. Meanwhile, Runway ML, which is developing an AI-powered creative suite for artists and which was a major research contributor to the text-to-image AI Stable Diffusion, landed $50 million in early December.

Imagen was co-founded by Gil, Ron Oren (ex-head of Sinsense’s R&D division) and Yoav Chai (formerly a Mellanox chip designer) in 2020, inspired by Chai’s experience waiting months for his wedding photos. In speaking with photographers, the co-founders say they realized a major pain point in the industry: post-production is repetitive and time-consuming. Because each photographer has their own style, the process isn’t necessarily easy to automate with existing tools.

The solution they arrived at — Imagen (not to be confused with Google’s Imagen) — aims to learn a photographer’s personal style based on around 3,000 samples of their previous work. Available as a cloud-based plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic, ImagenAI taps machine learning to attempt to capture editing styles and predict dozens of different editing parameters, taking around a half-second — and $0.05 per photo — to complete an edit.

Gil explains that Imagen’s editing profiles evolve over time, theoretically becoming more personalized as Imagen processes photos in various scenes and lighting conditions. The platform is ingesting more than 150 million photos annually for “tens of thousands” of customers globally, he said.

“Imagen profiles evolve and learn with the user over time, allowing better accuracy and consistency in applying each photographer’s style to new photos ingested into Imagen,” Gil said. “Any photographer that edits at scale and spends a lot of time on post production can benefit from time and cost savings while maintaining quality.”

Imagen also provides pretrained profiles, called Talent AI Profiles, based on “industry-leading” photographers’ unique editing styles. Gil claims that they’re tested on a large database of photos to ensure that they produce consistent results.

“Before Imagen, photographers could either edit manually or outsource to an editing service, which is costly, has a long turnaround time and doesn’t offer a guarantee on the results’ consistency,” Gil said. “Imagen democratizes professional photography post-production, eliminating the need for multiple professional photo editors to process a brand’s visual assets, and enabling photography assets to become available and usable much faster.”

Gil says that Imagen is currently profitable, with more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue coming in. In the near term, the company plans to launch a “culling” product that’ll select the best photos from a photoshoot and a local adjustments tool to identify specific parts in photos, such as subjects, to apply different editing adjustments.

When asked about competitors (other than manual outsourcing, of course), Gil acknowledges that Adobe for one maintains a number of AI image editing tools inside its products, particularly Lightroom. But he argues that none are as personalized or customizable as Imagen — at least not yet.

“Imagen’s ability to edit with a user’s own style, and to adjust editing to each photo based on the photo’s characteristics, gives a huge value to the user,” Gil said. “[With Imagen,] photographers can improve their earning potential by creating more valuable time to shoot and less time wasted on editing. 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 critical to achieving scale.”

Steffan K. Peyer, the managing director at Summit Partners, unsurprisingly agrees.

“There are more than a million professional photographers out there – plus many more aspiring enthusiasts – and many are limited by the immense burden of manual post-production work associated with each photo shoot,” he said via email. “With growth in digital assets and increasing expectations for both higher-quality and greater quantity of professional images, the Imagen team has built a platform that leverages proprietary, personalized machine learning technology previously not possible at scale.”

Imagen, which has 50 employees globally, expects to double the size of its workforce next year.

ImagenAI, which uses AI to personalize photo editing styles, lands $30M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch