Mickey Friedman co-launched Aptitude.ai in 2022, a 12 months after graduating from the College of Chicago. The corporate, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, deploys synthetic intelligence to excellent product photographs, offering total digital scenes and setups.
The method, she says, remakes ecommerce images by dramatically decreasing the price of photograph shoots whereas enhancing high quality.
In our current dialog, she addressed the rise of visible AI, the need of human intervention, and extra. All the audio is embedded under. The transcript is edited for size and readability.
Eric Bandholz: Who the heck are you?
Mickey Friedman: I personal an organization known as Aptitude. We launched in 2023. We’re constructing an AI instrument for product photographs, visualizations, and animations. We’re attempting to streamline the photograph shoot course of into an easy-to-use digital studio at a a lot decrease price.
We’re a workforce of 5. We’ve onboarded over one million customers now.
We begin with retailers’ present product photographs. We carry out coloration corrections, protect the lettering, and supply a whole digital scene. Model and textual content preservation are essential to us.
I used to be early on within the AI artwork scene. I used to be interested by advertising and marketing and photograph shoots, however I used to be extra drawn to the inventive course of, taking part in round with AI fashions to create artwork. The method within the early days was taking a little bit of textual content and producing pictures. There’s nonetheless a spot for that, akin to Midjourney. However ecommerce firms wish to protect their manufacturers and belongings and management the visible association of their scenes.
Bandholz: How are retailers utilizing your instrument to date?
Friedman: Photos for touchdown pages and natural social posts are extremely popular. We’re attempting to outline the inventive means of a photograph shoot. Many AI instruments take away people from that course of, however we would like the other, the place our prospects execute no matter imaginative and prescient they’ve.
People who gravitate to Aptitude are sometimes on the intersection of ecommerce and creativity — an in-house design workforce or an company. They perceive our platform intuitively.
There’s a number of storyboarding on Aptitude. We’ve had prospects with a imaginative and prescient of a dream photograph shoot they will’t execute due to in depth coordination and price. Utilizing Aptitude, they add the uncooked product photographs to the canvas, discover the props they want, and kind of replicate their photograph shoot on the platform.
Bandholz: Aptitude appears poised to scale.
Friedman: It’s a very massive market. We would like each model on the earth to make use of us in some capability. Smaller manufacturers with price range constraints might transition photograph shoots, whereas bigger manufacturers that may afford photograph shoots want higher instruments.
Regardless, so long as companies require photograph shoots, Aptitude will hopefully be concerned of their workflow. That’s our aim.
We’re branching out into verticals. For vogue manufacturers, we will place a sweater on a digital human mannequin, for instance. For product commercials, we cut back the associated fee.
We would like as a lot traction as attainable with smaller manufacturers. However we’ll probably transfer upmarket a bit, though we’ll by no means be too costly — manner lower than $500 a month.
Over time, our AI fashions will enhance, thus enhancing picture high quality. Ultimately, we’ll create banner adverts. The whole lot shall be AI-generated. My solely hope is that people are on the heart of that course of. They direct it as an alternative of a black field algorithm.
Bandholz: The place can individuals join Aptitude and observe you?
Friedman: The platform is Aptitude.ai. You’ll be able to add me on LinkedIn or observe me on X, @mickeyxfriedman.
