500px is a photo-sharing platform and marketplace that lets photographers post, share, and sell images to customers such as agencies, designers, corporate marketers, and creative campaign managers. The company hosts a catalog of roughly 55 million images from about 6 million community members. 500px plans to use new funding to build out product features and expand geographically, with a particular focus on entering the Greater China market via a joint venture and distribution partnership. The company has pursued commercialisation of user-generated visual content and competes with EyeEm, Getty, Flickr, and smaller marketplaces like PicFair. Over its history it has experienced operational setbacks, including an App Store removal over adult-content policy issues and the ouster of co-founder and former CEO Oleg Gutsol. To date 500px has raised $23 million in total financing. 500px is a Toronto-based photo-sharing service that has focused on enthusiasts and pro photographers. The company plans to build an online commercial marketplace to enable users to sell and license their photos, targeting a higher-priced tier ($250–$500 per photo). It also aims to pursue partnerships to distribute physical prints through lifestyle retailers. 500px has grown its user base from about 100,000 two years ago to roughly 2.5 million today and offers paid plans ($25/month and $75/month). Those paid plans contributed to nearly $1.3 million in revenue by the end of 2012, and the company expects to at least double that with the marketplace and additional premium features. 500px intends to triple its ~25-person team and open a Bay Area office for business development while keeping technical work in Toronto. 500px is a Toronto-based photo-sharing site focused on helping photographers reach larger audiences and sell prints. The service offers Digg-like Popular and Upcoming pages and maintains an editorial staff that curates Editor’s Choice and Fresh collections. The team migrated a LiveJournal-based photo community to the current site on Halloween 2009 and, after two years of bootstrapping, grew from 1,000 users in 2009 to over 85,000 (about 45,000 joined in the last three months). The site experienced 60% growth in the prior 30 days and attracted 2.5 million visits in the last month. 500px generates revenue through a $50 pro account with custom layouts and by enabling photographers to sell prints. Management plans to use new funding to hire more engineers and build a global platform.

Total raised

$22M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Jul 2015