Lightricks, the app developers behind photo editing apps like Enlight and Facetune, has raised a massive $60m round to help us blur acne out of existence.
In the age of the selfie, Lightricks’ apps have gotten nearly 7m downloads in the past 30 days (2m of which came from Facetune alone), and they’re on track to bring in $100m in revenue next year.
They also have a pretty lofty mission statement for an app that bills itself as a photo editor for “perfect selfies.”
Saving the world, one selfie at a time
The Israeli-based company was founded in 2013 by 5 entrepreneurs from the computer graphics, image processing, and AI fields who, according to Crunchbase, all “left promising careers in order to realize their dream.”
Apparently, the team of Ph.D. students, with their “30 years of combined experience in academics” and tech, was frustrated with “the gap between state-of-the-art algorithms developed in academia and the lack of powerful and user-friendly image editing tools.”
Translation: We left academia to make shit ton of money on an app that makes your teeth whiter than a seal pup on a snowdrift.
But, there’s no question, they’re killing it
The AI-based tech underpinning the app is valuable in itself, and Lightricks’ founder says the company is profitable with almost a million paying subscribers and 270% revenue growth year-over-year.
Lightricks will use the funding to double the size of their 300-person team, while continually updating their product — and our faces.
