EyeEm, pronounced "I am", is a technology company with a global photography community and marketplace that was co-founded by Florian Meissner, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane, and Lorenz Aschoff in Berlin. Eyeem.com and the EyeEm mobile app is a place for photographers of any ability to share, interact and learn more about photography. The technology company uses artificial intelligence to find the best images to license to brands, agencies or individuals looking for authentic imagery. As of August 2016, the community consists of over 18 million photographers and more than 70M photos.
History
In early 2010, photo enthusiasts Florian Meissner, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane and Lorenz Aschoff came together to discuss mobile photography. By March, they decided to host one of the world's first mobile photography competitions and host an exhibition. The winners and runners-up were part of an exhibition that took place in Berlin in June 22 of the same year. During the beta period, EyeEm was an iPhone only app and was called EYE'EM, and managed to have more than 5,000 users from 79 countries. In early 2011, Meissner, Rizk, Sadakane, and Aschoff decided to work on the idea full-time and launched the first version of the EyeEm app on Android and iOS in August 2011 following the beta test period. In March 2014, EyeEm partnered with Getty Images 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 own online marketplace where users can sell their own images. A month later, in April 2015, the technology 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 an effort to showcase the “most beautiful images from featured photographers and albums.” In September 2015, EyeEm launched EyeEm Vision, a deep learningcomputer vision framework that recognizes concepts and ranks aesthetics of images. 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 analyzes the camera roll and uses computer vision to tag the images and rank the photos by how good they are. The app made headlines at Apple's worldwide developer conference, where it was announced that The Roll will be one of the first apps to deeply integrate with Siri, "by combining speech recognition with EyeEm’s aesthetic rank technology". In July 2016, EyeEm reaches 18M users and opens their Web Upload to all users so that it is as easy as possible for Flickr users to upload their pictures to EyeEm Market and join their photography based community. 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 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 applied to determine the discoverability of each photo, and suggest keywords. The company applied this to an iOS app called The Roll, which launched in May 2016 and organizes the images on your camera roll.
Funding
The company has raised $24 million to date in funding from Valar Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital, Passion Capital, Wellington Partners, 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. EyeEm was incorporated in Berlin, Germany, in February 2011 by founders Florian Meissner, Lorenz Aschoff, Gen Sadakane, and Ramzi Rizk.
