EyeEm (originally Eye'em), pronounced "I am", is a German technology company that provides services related to photography. It was co-founded by Florian Meissner, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane, and Lorenz Aschoff in Berlin in 2011. Eyeem.com and the EyeEm mobile app offer photographers the ability to share photographs and discuss photography. The technology company uses artificial intelligence to find the images to license to brands, agencies or individuals. As of August 2016, the community had over 18 million users and more than 70 million photos. In June 2021, EyeEm was acquired by Talenthouse.

History

In early 2010, photographers Florian Meissner, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane and Lorenz Aschoff decided to host a mobile photography competition. The winners and runners-up were part of an exhibition that took place in Berlin on June 22 of the same year. During the beta period, EyeEm was an iPhone-only app and was called EYE'EM, and had around 5,000 users from 79 countries. In early 2011, the founders began working on the idea full-time and launched the first version of the EyeEm app on Android and iOS in August 2011. In March 2014, EyeEm partnered with

Getty Images Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is an American visual media company and is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets— creative ...

to distribute photographs taken by EyeEm users. By June 2014, EyeEm had over 10 million users. In March 2015, EyeEm reached 13 million users and launched Market, its

online marketplace An online marketplace (or online e-commerce marketplace) is a type of e-commerce website where product or service information is provided by multiple third parties. Online marketplaces are the primary type of multichannel ecommerce and can be a way ...

where users can sell their own images. A month later, in April 2015, the company raised $18M in Series B funding. The round was led by Valar Ventures and includes existing investors Earlybird Ventures, Passion Capital, Wellington Partners, Atlantic Labs and Open Ocean Capital. As part of the new round, Valar took a board seat at the company. In June 2015, EyeEm launched the Discover Feed, a manually curated feed. In September 2015, EyeEm launched EyeEm Vision (previously called EyeVision), a

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

framework that attempts to identify and rank images by aesthetics and concept. In January 2016, EyeEm announced a new partnership with Alamy as another distribution partner besides Getty. In May 2016, EyeEm launched The Roll, an iOS app that attempts to analyze images to rank them by quality. At the

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in th ...

(WWDC) in 2016, it was announced that The Roll would be one of the first apps to integrate with Siri. In July 2016, EyeEm reaches 18M users and opened their Web Upload to all users. On February 16, 2019, EyeEm announced that they got hacked and its database was put for sale on the Dream Market. The database consists of roughly 22 million records and included email addresses and passwords. The passwords were stored encrypted (hashed and salted) with the SHA-1 algorithm.

Technology

EyeEm's image recognition technology uses artificial intelligence to tag and rank images based on an aesthetic score assigned to each photo. When users upload a photo via the Web Upload tool, this technology is used to suggest keywords. The company applied this to an iOS app called The Roll, which launched in May 2016, and organizes the images on users' camera roll.

Funding

EyeEm was incorporated in Berlin, Germany, in February 2011 by founders Florian Meissner, Lorenz Aschoff, Gen Sadakane, and Ramzi Rizk. The company has raised $24 million to date in funding from Valar Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital, Passion Capital,

Wellington Partners Wellington Partners is a pan-European venture capital firm with some €800 million under management and offices in London, Munich and Zurich. The firm invests in young companies throughout Europe, mainly in the areas of technology, life sciences a ...

, Atlantic Labs and OpenOcean. In 2018, it was revealed that the company raised an additional $10 million in an internal round from existing investors, with new investors Cipio Partners joining the round. In June 2021, New Value AG, also known as Talenthouse, acquired EyeEm for close to $40 million USD.

References

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History

Technology

Funding

References

See also