EyeEm High Quality Mobile Photography Community and Marketplace Raises $6M

BERLIN and SAN FRANCISCO, July 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EyeEm inspired. EyeEm, the world's first community and marketplace for high quality mobile photography, raises $6M USD from Earlybird Venture Capital and existing investors Wellington Partners and Passion Capital to extend global reach and build a mobile photography marketplace for the smartphone generation. EyeEm is for mobile photographers who want to capture, enhance, share and discover images in a highly creative and inspired environment – right from their mobile device. The EyeEm smartphone application is free, available in 20 languages and available on iOS and Android.

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EyeEm Community. The EyeEm community, growing at 1M new users per month, is for the photographer inside of all of us (as hobbyists, amateurs, professionals or even no-togs - those who have never considered themselves photographers) who want to capture and enjoy high quality photography. EyeEm's intelligently searchable, constant stream of high quality, inspired photographs allows for deep community engagement and connection while at the same time offering an inspiring channel for observers to lean back and enjoy the output of this highly skilled collective. Millions in the EyeEm community are also engaged in photography 'Missions' or gamified photography contests. EyeEm mobile photographers naturally own their images (will remain the sole owner of image rights) and brands, marketers or agencies may purchase them directly from the photographers. 

"The community continually inspires me. Our entire team comes from photography roots and we are striving to build the best community for mobile imagery and enable a new generation of photographers to take their passion to the next level," says Florian Meissner, EyeEm CEO or @Flo.

EyeEm Smart. The online photo market is full of low quality snapshots getting lost on social networks and sinking into a digital oblivion. EyeEm's smart tagging and data enrichment technology helps photographers and clients quickly surface relevant content through a very intuitive search interface. By automatically indexing photos, EyeEm can match and connect community members, help enthusiastic photographers and no-togs alike get discovered and followed by millions as well as connect with like minded people and eventually brands who may want to purchase their photos.

EyeEm Marketplace. The EyeEm marketplace is for those brands, agencies and small businesses who want to find easily searchable and crowd-sourced mobile stock images of places, people and environments. Since its launch, selected brands such as Lufthansa, Redbull and Vice Magazine have set up highly curated missions to crowd source new images for their (social) marketing campaigns. The community created images were successfully sold through the EyeEm platform with a revenue share for the photographers. While some brands/marketers have already purchased photos captured by the EyeEm community, the full marketplace offering will be launched later this year.

"EyeEm is the number one mobile photographers' community. Look at what is being captured on photo sharing apps - it's often cluttered with mundane life events. However if you see the imagery on EyeEm you cannot help but become totally captivated. We see the passion in the fanatical photography community and the opportunity to expand the $5B stock photography and $12B commissioned photography market and provide brands with high quality and authentic images and photographers with much greater exposure," says Jason Whitmire, Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital.

Investors in EyeEm include Earlybird Venture Capital, Christophe Maire (TechCrunch readers' Best Angel investor of the year), Daniel Waterhouse of Wellington Partners and Stefan Glaenzer of Passion Capital.

About EyeEm. EyeEm is the world's first high quality mobile photography community and marketplace. EyeEm was founded in August 2011 by photo-enthusiasts Florian Meissner, Lorenz Aschoff, Ramzi Rizk and Gen Sadakane with a strong belief in the quality and community of mobile photography. The EyeEm smartphone application is free, available in 20 languages and available on iOS and Android. For additional information visit us at www.eyeem.com

For media inquiries contact: Nicole DeMeo [email protected]
+1 415 533 2599, +49 1577 159 5225 

SOURCE EyeEm