Orbeus launched PhotoTime, an iOS photo gallery replacement that uses image and facial recognition to let users search photos by who’s in them, what they depict, or where they were taken. PhotoTime scans photos across iCloud, Instagram, Facebook, and local storage, automatically tagging content and allowing custom user tags. The app anonymizes photos before uploading them for analysis and deletes image data after processing, stating that photos are never stored on PhotoTime’s servers. Orbeus’s core technology, ReKognition, can label images, index video via image-to-text, and recognize faces and attributes (race, emotion, age, gender), objects and scenes; that technology is licensed to software and app developers for a fee. PhotoTime is offered free on iTunes and presented as a more polished consumer demo compared with competitors like Impala. The company says a future PhotoTime release will add Dropbox support. Orbeus has raised $4.7M to date, including a recently closed pre‑A round, and is led by CEO Yi Li with co-founders Tianqiang Liu (VP of engineering) and Meng Wang (CTO). Orbeus offers ReKognition, a visual-recognition API platform that performs face detection, face reading (gender, emotion, age range, attractiveness) and scene understanding while intentionally avoiding identity recognition. The company has released a Glass-specific SDK (ReKoGlass) to make those capabilities available to Google Glass developers. Use cases cited include attendance tracking, audience gender/age measurement, interactive advertising/signage and dating-site photo verification, and the company is closing a deal with a photo-album provider to group photos by faces. Orbeus launched its API to the public last August and reports a customer base of over 1,000, a small percentage of whom are paying customers. Its freemium product sees over 3 million API calls and offers 40,000 free API calls (500 per day). The startup was founded by Meng Wang and Tianqiang Liu, later joined by CEO Ning Xu, and went through Chicago’s Excelerate Labs before relocating to Mountain View; it is in the process of closing a $1.1 million seed round.

Total raised

$3M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Nov 2014