 | |
| Company type | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Stock photography, stock footage, stock music |
| Founded | 3 April 2005 |
| Founder | Andy Sitt, Stephanie Sitt |
| Fate | Active |
| Headquarters | Selangor, Malaysia |
Number of employees | 350 (2015) |
| Parent | Inmagine Group |
| Website | 123rf |
123RF, a branch of Inmagine Group, is a stock photos agency founded in 2005 which sells royalty-free images and stock photography. The company also has an expansive collection of vector graphics, icons, fonts, videos, and audio files.
In 2000, 123RF founder Andy Sitt left his job at a British company that sold stock images in CDs while showing customers printed catalogs. Andy launched his e-commerce business by setting up Inmagine, selling premium large-format photo prints. Working together with co-founder and current CEO Stephanie Sitt, [1] Inmagine Group is one of the few technology companies to have bootstrapped globally from Asia.[ citation needed ]
From the beginning, Inmagine produced proprietary content which required in-house photographers, graphic designers, professional models, makeup artists, and a sales team to cater to demand.[ citation needed ]
In 2005, Inmagine set up 123RF, which offers royalty-free stock images, videos, and audio clips. Unlike the previous business model, 123RF allows photographers around the world to sell their work on the platform under a crowdsourcing model. [2]
In 2011, Inmagine established a global presence with 44 regional offices worldwide. [3] Offices were founded in North and Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australasia. [4]
In 2019, Inmagine consolidated and streamlined its offerings into three main products: 123RF, Pixlr, and Designs.ai. The launching of Pixlr Market (now Stock by Pixlr) and Pixlr Editor commences. [5]
In 2020, the company launched its first artificial intelligence platform, Inmagine Brain. [6] In November 2020, the company confirmed that it had been subject to a data breach, with 8.3 million customer records available for sale on the dark web. [7]
Through 123RF, Inmagine created a visual guide in 2021 to predict image search trends. [8]
In June 2022, the company launched its free images section where audiences can download images for free, but with only a limited amount of daily downloads. [9]
In 2023, 123RF launched its AI-powered Search for more precise and intuitive searching. [10] AI Image Variations, a feature that uses machine learning to generate multiple unique variations of a single image [11] and AI Image Generator, [12] a tool that generates custom images based on users' specific prompts.
In March 2017, 123RF acquired TheHungryJPEG, a UK-registered font and graphics marketplace and its sister company Craftbundles for an undisclosed sum. [13] [14]
In April 2017, 123RF acquired Pixlr, an online web-based image editor from Autodesk for an undisclosed sum. [15]
In November 2017, 123RF acquired Vectr, a web-based vector editor and Story & Heart, a video education platform. [16]
Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is a visual media company and supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video, and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets—creative professionals, the media, and corporate.
Microstock photography, also known as micropayment photography, is a part of the stock photography industry. What defines a company as a microstock photography company is that they (1) source their images almost exclusively via the Internet, (2) do so from a wider range of photographers than the traditional stock agencies, and (3) sell their images at a very low rate for a royalty-free (RF) image.
Shutterstock, Inc. is an American provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools; it is headquartered in New York. Founded in 2003 by programmer and photographer Jon Oringer, Shutterstock maintains a library of around 200 million royalty-free stock photos, vector graphics, and illustrations, with around 10 million video clips and music tracks available for licensing. Originally a subscription site only, Shutterstock expanded beyond subscriptions into a la carte pricing in 2008. It has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2012.
The Naver Corporation is a South Korean internet conglomerate headquartered in Seongnam that operates the search engine Naver. Naver established itself as an early pioneer in the use of user-generated content through the creation of the online Q&A platform Knowledge iN.
Imgur is an American online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on social gossip that was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009. The service has hosted viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit.
Zomato is an Indian multinational restaurant aggregator and food delivery company. It was founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008. Zomato provides information, menus and user-reviews of restaurants as well as food delivery options from partner restaurants in more than 1,000 Indian cities and towns, as of 2022–23. Zomato rivals Swiggy in food delivery and hyperlocal space.
Pixlr is a group of AI-powered SaaS creative tools including Pixlr.com, Designs.ai and Vectr.com. Pixlr.com is a cloud-based set of image editing tools and utilities, including a number of ĥ, AI image generation and a photo sharing service.
Alamy Limited is a British privately owned stock photography agency launched in September 1999. It is an online supplier of stock images, videos, and other image material. Their content comes from agencies and independent photographers, or are collected from news archives, museums, national collections, and public domain content copied from Wikimedia Commons. Its headquarters are in Milton Park, near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It has a development and operations centre at Technopark in Trivandrum, Kerala, India, and a sales office in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
HungryGoWhere is a food and restaurant review website based in Singapore.
Pond5 is a New York–based online marketplace for royalty-free media. The company licenses stock footage, stock music, stock photography, sound effects, Adobe After Effects templates, and 3D models. Pond5 claims to have the world's largest collection of stock footage, and that they host more than 38 million clips as of September 2023.
Polarr is a startup headquartered in San Jose, California, that offers applications to allow creators to make and distribute photos and video filters. Its products include mobile apps for creators to create and search for image filters, as well web-based products to edit photos.
Whoscall is a mobile application that offers caller identification services. It was developed by Gogolook Co., Ltd., a listed company in Taiwan. The function of Whoscall is to identify incoming calls, detect scam/harassment numbers, and filter spam text messages, blocking them accordingly. Its name is derived from a shorter version of the phrase “Who is calling?“. The app currently has over 100 million users, 2.6 billion phone number entries, 25 billion identified number & SMS, and is available in 31 countries/regions, including Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Brazil. The application owns the largest number database in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Whoscall is also the strategic partner of several governmental agencies in their anti-fraud efforts, including the National Police Agency (Taiwan), the Financial Supervisory Service , Fukuoka City Government., Police Cyber Taskforce (Thailand) the Malaysia police and state government.
Picsart is an Armenian-American technology company based in Miami, Florida, United States and Yerevan, Armenia that develops the Picsart suite of online photo and video editing applications, with a social creative community. The platform allows users to take and edit pictures and videos, draw with layers, and share the images on Picsart and other social networks. It is one of the world's most popular apps, with reportedly more than 1 billion downloads across 180 countries.
In Vichet, is the co-founder and CEO of one of Cambodia’s first and most successful forays into e-commerce. He and his three other siblings founded Little Fashion in December 2010. He is also co-founder of Khmerload, also known as Mediaload, the first Cambodian tech startup to receive investment from Silicon Valley investors. It secured seed funding of $200,000 from 500 Startups in 2017. Channel NewsAsia featured Vichet as one of the great disruptors in Cambodia.
Jirnexu Sdn Bhd is a Southeast Asian financial technology startup headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The company provides technology to help financial institutions manage different stages of the customer journey: marketing, acquisition, fulfilment and retention. It has business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) operations in Malaysia and Indonesia.
VSCO, formerly known as VSCO Cam, is a photography mobile app for iOS and Android devices. The app was created by Joel Flory and Greg Lutze. The VSCO app allows users to capture photos in the app and edit them, using preset filters and editing tools.
Voyagin was a tour and activity online booking platform headquartered in Tokyo. The company was founded in 2011 as FindJPN, rebranded as Voyagin in 2012 by its founders, then rebranded again by Rakuten.
PT Trinusa Travelindo, operating as Traveloka is an Indonesian technology company focused on travel and ticketing. Operating a services website of the same name and based out of Jakarta, Indonesia, Traveloka is active in six countries, and in 2022 remained the largest online travel app in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2012 as a travel search engine, it now also offers services such as attraction tickets, activities, transportation rentals, and restaurant vouchers. It also provides financial services such as credit and insurance. Classified as a unicorn company and regarded as functionally similar to Expedia, in 2022 it was valued approximately at US$3 billion.
Quest Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2011 by James Tan and Wang Yunming in Beijing, China. The firm mainly focuses on digital commerce investments and has an office in Singapore. The firm deploys funds across Asia in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Quest Ventures is also the largest anchor tenant at JTC Launchpad.
Lightricks, founded in January 2013, is a company that develops video and image editing mobile apps and software, known particularly for its selfie-editing app, Facetune. Headquartered in Jerusalem, the firm has approximately 600 employees. As of 2023, its apps have been downloaded over 730 million times. In 2024, Lightricks introduced LTX Studio, a platform for creating and editing videos using AI.
