Lightricks

Market position

Lightricks describes itself as a developer of widely used photo and video editing apps; its app suite has surpassed 500 million downloads and Facetune alone had been downloaded over 200 million times as of 2023. The company positions itself in the creator economy as a provider of creative tools, services and monetization opportunities, and more recently as a supplier of open-source generative video models.

The company pairs computational photography and machine learning research with consumer product design, reuses a common graphical engine and research prototypes across multiple apps, and has released several of its LTX generative video models as open source. It also combines creative tools with creator monetization through the Popular Pays marketing platform.

Technology

The company's technology combines academic research in computational photography and machine learning with mobile product design. An internal infrastructure team builds a shared graphical engine underlying all of the apps, and a research team prototypes state-of-the-art techniques for reuse across multiple products. Its generative AI work includes text-to-image capabilities on mobile devices and the LTX Video model family: a 2-billion-parameter open-source image-to-video model, a 13-billion-parameter model able to generate five seconds of video in four seconds, and LTX-2, which generates 4K-quality video with synchronized audio and was released as open source with code, benchmarks and trainer data.

Go-to-market

Distribution through mobile app stores with freemium subscriptions, supported by data-driven performance marketing in which data science teams model cohort revenue and inform ad creative. The company also markets to professional creators and agencies with LTX Studio and distributes open-source models to developers.

Consumers and creators ranging from beginners to professional artists, social media content creators, small and medium-sized businesses (via Boosted), and creative and advertising agencies using LTX Studio.

Geography

Headquartered on the Hebrew University campus in Jerusalem, Israel, with offices in Haifa, London, New York and Chicago; users span countries worldwide.

History

Five Ph.D. students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — Zeev Farbman, Nir Pochter, Yaron Inger, Amit Goldstein and Itai Tsiddon, the last a former Supreme Court of Israel clerk — created the company in January 2013. Facetune launched in March 2013 and was named one of the App Store's Best of 2013, Google Play's best app of 2014, and Apple's most downloaded paid app in 2017; Videoleap was Apple's 2017 App of the Year. The company was bootstrapped initially and was the subject of a Harvard Business School case study, "Bootstrapping at Lightricks," before raising a $10 million Series A in 2015, a $60 million Series B in November 2018, a $135 million Series C in July 2019 and a $130 million Series D announced in September 2021 at a $1.8 billion valuation. In 2022 it acquired Popular Pays and began adding generative AI capabilities to its apps; from 2024 onward it shipped LTX Studio and the LTX Video model family. Headcount stood at about 600 in 2021 and was subsequently cut by half.

Risks & controversies

The Wikipedia article on the company carries editorial notices stating that a major contributor appears to have a close connection to the subject and that portions contain promotional content. Headcount, about 600 in 2021, has since been reduced by half.