Lightricks: The Oldest Generative AI Unicorn
How to leverage AI for creator economy
The landscape of Generative AI (GenAI) changes almost every week. Just like with Imbue the other day. The company focused on reasoning in AI, joined the unicorn family overnight after raising an insane $200 million Series B round.
In the breakneck race, let’s not forget about veterans: number 6 on our list is Lightricks, the oldest generative AI unicorn. Also, the first one on the list without a proprietary foundation model. A pure user of GenAI.
This is a part of the Unicorn Chronicles series, so far we’ve covered #1 OpenAI, #2 Anthropic, #3 Inflection, #4 Hugging Face, and #5 Cohere.
What is Lightricks, what do they build, and what is their $1.8 billion valuation based on? Let's explore:
The starting point of Lightricks
Product line and strategy
Generative AI introduction and tech behind it
Safety thoughts: accessible yet safe
Financial situation
How Lightricks makes money
Bonus: All important links about the founders
The starting point of Lightricks
Lightricks was founded in 2013 by four Hebrew University (HU) Ph.D. students: Zeev Farbman, Nir Pochter, Yaron Inger, and Amit Goldstein, along with Itai Tsiddon, a former Supreme Court of Israel clerk who later transitioned to a board position.
Zeev Farbman, the Co-Founder & CEO of Lightricks, initially aimed for an academic career. He pursued computer science for his Bachelor's, Master's, and eventually his Ph.D. at HU. His research focus always revolved around computational photography, resulting in several peer-reviewed research papers in the field. Notably, one of his co-authored papers, titled "Edge-preserving decompositions for multi-scale tone and detail manipulation," garnered 1745 citations and was implemented in MATLAB as "tonemapfarbman." Alongside his studies, Zeev also gained experience working at Microsoft and Adobe.
Despite his promising academic path, Farbman decided to leave it and co-found Lightricks with Yaron Inger (CTO), and Amit Goldstein (COO) – both alumni of the Israeli Intelligence Corps' elite 8200 unit, renowned for top-tier programmers selected through rigorous recruitment; Nir Pochter (CMO), and Itai Tsiddon – the sole founder outside Israel, focusing on capital, platform relations, and media outreach. Though no longer an employee, he remains on the board, aiding the CEO in corporate development.
It was 2013, two years before OpenAI, four years before the groundbreaking paper “Attention Is All You Need” introduced Transformers. Reflecting on their early days, the founders shared,
Two months after founding a company, leveraging the popularity of social media, the team developed Facetune – an app to edit photos, retouch selfies, and add filters.
Product line and strategy
In the early days, the company’s target audience consisted of individuals enhancing the visual appeal of their social media content. As the demand for editing tools skyrocketed, Lightricks adapted to the evolving trends in the market. They were one of the few early ones to recognize the power content creation held. They made a point to serve creator community ever since. Within a short span, the startup powered a range of AI-powered tools including super popular apps like Videoleap, Filtertune, Beatleap, Artleap, Lightleap, and Boosted.
An interesting facet of Lightricks' strategy involved the cross-pollination of features from their extensive portfolio. They incorporated the "Animate" feature from Motionleap into Photoleap, enabling users to add motion to static images.
The company's other internally developed apps suggest a potential for further synergy. Lightricks' research and development efforts are transferable across their suite of applications, building an ecosystem that resonates with users, especially content creators. Lightricks has spared users the need to learn a new app layout each time AI capabilities advance – thoughtful!
According to the company's website, Lightricks' applications have been downloaded nearly 700 million times, boasting a user base exceeding 30 million monthly active users. Competitors like Lensa momentarily rose with AI-driven "magic avatars," but their lack of feature depth and sustained user engagement led to their decline.
Generative AI introduction and tech behind it
Explore the insights from our investigative articles about GenAI unicorns. To get the insights → read further
In August 2022, Lightricks introduced a "Text-to-Image" generator within its apps like Photoleap, a photo editing tool, and Motionleap, which can animate a still photo to make it look like it’s in motion. They were one of the first to use open-source code released by Stable Diffusion.
In 2023, the company (now 10 years old) is working on its next-gen video editing software Videoleap that can copy one style of video to another.
Safety thoughts: accessible yet safe
Farbman is not an artist himself, but he does have a vision in mind that he wants to share. He wants people to be creative even if they don't possess the technical know-how. Also to strengthen the creator economy that way.
Along with his team, he is optimistic regarding AI. “Otherwise, it becomes challenging to find restful sleep at night."
While the company’s founders have not been very vocal about the problematic concerns flagged around AI-based image tools, co-founder Yaron Inger, said his company has taken steps to address concerns about safety among users. NSFW (stands for "Not Safe For Work" and is used to label explicit or offensive content that's inappropriate for professional or public settings) content is a risk with AI art-generating systems, but Lightricks uses Google Cloud Vision API to block users from requesting such material. Stable Diffusion also initially came with a "pretty basic NSFW filter," so Lightricks has added its filters to protect the users.
Financial situation
For the first two years, Zeev Farbman led the company in bootstrapping mode, relying on personal finances or the new company's operating revenues. Zeev even became a prominent contributor to startup publications, sharing insights on bootstrap model, tech, the creator economy.
In 2015, Lightricks decided to raise the first funding round. $10 million Series A were led by Viola Ventures. In 2018, another $60 million came from Insight Venture Partners and ClalTech. In 2019, they also participated in the Series C round led by Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing. The company raised $135 million with valuation at $1 billion.This pushed Lightricks' total funding to $205 million, following tripled revenue for three years, 180 million app downloads, and nearly three million paying subscribers, marking its entry into the Israeli "unicorn" club.
The last Series D funding round was on September 19, 2021, raising $100 million primary and $30 million secondary.
In 2022, Farbman reflected on Lightricks' journey, mentioning challenges like business model re-evaluations, transitioning from a paid app to a freemium subscription model, and now delving into AI within the creator economy, creating a one-stop shop for creators. To achieve that, in 2022, the company acquired Popular Pays, the leading Chicago-based software company that connects brands with creators to advertise and monetize their work.
In 2023, CB Insights ranked the company fifth among 13 global generative AI unicorns. As of September 11, 2023, our research places Lightricks 6th among 16 Generative AI unicorns.
What started as a bootstrapped company between doctoral friends has turned into a $1.8 billion goliath in the app creation industry, very neatly leveraging the power of Generative AI.
How Lightricks makes money
According to Statista, “in 2022, Lightricks Ltd. had generated approximately 131 million U.S. dollars via in-app revenues from Google Play and Apple App Store users combined. Between 2015 and 2022, Lightrick increased its app revenues by almost 500 percent, gaining the valuation of unicorn company in 2019. As of 2022, the Jerusalem-based app publisher can count more than ten video and photo editing applications available to users on both iOS and Android, with video editing app VideoLeap being particularly popular among TikTok creators.”
Lightricks seems not to have ambitions to develop their own foundation models, instead relying on the robustness of the creator economy, whose market size was estimated to be $104.2 billion in 2022, more than doubling since 2019. They merely need to continue successfully leveraging the Generative AI models and tools that emerge almost daily.
Bonus: All important links about the founders
Zeev Farbman, Co-Founder & CEO
Nir Pochter, Co-Founder & CMO
Yaron Inger, Co-Founder & CTO
Amit Goldstein, Co-Founder & COO
Itai Tsiddo, Co-Founder & Board Member
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