 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Stock photography, stock footage, stock music |
| Founded | 3 April 2005 |
| Founder | Andy Sitt, Stephanie Sitt |
| Fate | Active |
| Headquarters | |
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]
Stock photography is the supply of photographs that are often licensed for specific uses. The stock photo industry, which began to gain hold in the 1920s, has established models including traditional macrostock photography, midstock photography, and microstock photography. Conventional stock agencies charge from several hundred to several thousand US dollars per image, while microstock photography may sell for around US$0.25 cents. Professional stock photographers traditionally place their images with one or more stock agencies on a contractual basis, while stock agencies may accept the high-quality photos of amateur photographers through online submission.
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.
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HomeAway was a vacation rental marketplace. It operated through 50 websites in 23 languages through which it offered rentals of cabins, condos, castles, villas, barns, and farmhouses.
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HungryGoWhere is a food and restaurant review website based in Singapore.
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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.
Picsart is an Armenian-American technology company based in Miami, Florida 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 (Jirnexu) 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 currently 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.
CleverTap is a California-based SaaS company that offers customer lifecycle management and mobile marketing services. The company was established in May 2013, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
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, 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 680 million times.
