EyeEm operates a photo marketplace that leverages its social app to surface authentic imagery and give amateur photographers a chance to monetize their work. The company has been building machine-learning algorithms to identify visually appealing aspects of photos and aims to index every photo in the world. Its marketplace has launched in the United States, and the team plans to expand into Europe, Asia and South America. EyeEm has invested in relationships with businesses and publications and in “missions” to drive contributor engagement and sourcing of buyable images. The company says underlying technology and image understanding will remain a core focus as it scales the marketplace and community internationally. EyeEm is a free Berlin-based iOS, Android and Windows Phone photo app that combines a social/photo-sharing product with a visual search engine and a crowdsourced stock-photo Marketplace. The company’s image-parsing algorithms organize photos by keywords to enable discovery and to shortcut mobile tagging. EyeEm is using funds to build out its visual search engine and to expand the EyeEm Marketplace, with plans to promote selling later in the year. It is talking with “large internet companies” in the U.S. and Asia to license its visual indexing technology, and the product already works in 20 languages. The Marketplace lets users present work for sale and accept buyer requests where buyers can name a price; customers have included Lufthansa, Redbull and Vice Magazine via gamified “Missions.” The app has around 8 million downloads and was growing at roughly 1 million installs per month since October 2012; the company does not disclose active user counts. EyeEm is a smartphone camera and photo-sharing app from Berlin that emphasizes content discovery by monitoring users' tastes to recommend albums of similar photos. The app automatically categorises images using a feature called "vibes," which groups photos into topical streams, and offers ten built-in filters for quick enhancement. Capturing, filtering, location tagging and sharing to Facebook and Twitter are core, easy-to-use features. Its interface has been praised for superior content discovery compared with apps like Flickr and Instagram. EyeEm launched on the iOS App Store and Android Marketplace after a beta trial with over 5,000 users. The company has raised an undisclosed seed round from Passion Capital, Wellington Partners and angel investor Christophe Maire, who serves as executive chairman. The founding team includes Florian Meissner, Lorenz Aschoff, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane, Wojtek Sczygiol and Guillaume Cambon.

Total raised

$24M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Apr 2015