Polarr, a San Jose, California-based innovator of edge AI technology for photography and video, announced recently that it raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Threshold Ventures (formerly known as DFJ Venture). Cota Capital and Pear Ventures also participated in this round.
In conjunction with ths funding round Threshold partner Chris Kelley and Pear Ventures managing partner Mar Hershenson are joining the Polarr’s board of directors.
“As deep learning compute shifts from the cloud to edge devices, there is a growing opportunity to provide sophisticated and creative edge AI technologies to mobile devices,” said Borui Wang, co-founder and CEO, Polarr. “This new round of financing is a tangible endorsement of our approach to enable and inspire everyone to make beautiful creations.”
This funding round will be used for supporting research and development, engineering, and technology partnership initiatives. Polarr’s computer vision and deep learning technology are known for transforming mobile photography and video in order to help anyone create professional quality content for composing and editing photos and videos. The Polarr photo editing application is used by more than four million novice and professional photographers every month.
As deep learning becomes ubiquitous in applications and artificial intelligence giants are building advanced frameworks and mobile device makers are building specialized chipsets to support the technologies, developers have to relearn how to work with each chip. The Polarr Vision Engine is chip agnostic from a developer’s perspective and provides a higher-level abstraction for running deep learning models on any device ranging from smartphones to drone cameras. And Polarr’s AI modules run on the edge, meaning it works with low memory and power consumption.
Notably, Polarr developed a deep learning based AI composition capability for the native camera app on the Samsung Galaxy S10. The Galaxy S10’s Composition Guide utilizes Polarr’s technology and it was trained with thousands of shots from professional photographers in order to determine the most desirable compositions. The Polarr Vision Engine is also used by many other hardware and software makers like Qualcomm, Oppo and HoverCam.
“Polarr’s expertise across design, hardware, and deep learning is really unique,” said Chris Kelley, a partner at Threshold Ventures. “Not only do they give consumers a way to leverage skills from the world’s best photographers, but pros can also use their tools to create something really special.”
