Lightricks, the maker of the popular photo-editing app Facetune, raised $135m to expand its popular selfie-perfecting products.
The continued success of the company, which is now valued at more than $1B, shows that face-editing apps are no temporary trend.
The company is growing fast
After launching in 2013, the Facetune app grew rapidly, pulling in $10m in annual revenue by 2015 — all before the company had even raised any outside money.
But Facetune really hit its stride when it shot to the top of the charts as the most popular app in Apple’s store in 2017.
Since then, the app has remained popular in spite of stiff selfie competition from companies like Snapchat.
But now Lightricks is in the big leagues…
And the company is looking for new ways to monetize its technology. In addition to Facetune, the company has also launched Enlight, a mobile picture-editing app for amateur photographers, and Swish, a video-editing app for marketers.
The company also rolled out Facetune 2.0, an update to the original app that — to the frustration of users — put some features behind a paywall.
Lightricks, which now has 3m subscribers across its products and has raised a total of $205m, plans to double down on investment in new tools and to start strategically acquiring companies to grow.
