Mickey Friedman co-launched Aptitude.ai in 2022, a yr after graduating from the College of Chicago. The corporate, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, deploys synthetic intelligence to excellent product pictures, offering total digital scenes and setups.
The method, Friedman says, remakes ecommerce pictures by dramatically reducing the price of photograph shoots whereas bettering high quality.
In our latest dialog, she addressed the rise of visible AI, the need of human intervention, and extra. Your entire 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 photos, visualizations, and animations. We’re making an attempt 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 pictures. We carry out colour corrections, protect the lettering, and supply a complete digital scene. Model and textual content preservation are vital to us.
I used to be early on within the AI artwork scene. I used to be curious about advertising and marketing and photograph shoots, however I used to be extra drawn to the artistic 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 generating images. There’s nonetheless a spot for that, corresponding to Midjourney. However ecommerce firms wish to protect their manufacturers and property and management the visible association of their scenes.
Bandholz: How are retailers utilizing your instrument so far?
Friedman: Photographs for touchdown pages and organic social posts are highly regarded. We’re making an attempt to outline the artistic technique of a photograph shoot. Many AI instruments take away people from that course of, however we wish the other, the place our clients execute no matter imaginative and prescient they’ve.
Of us 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 clients with a imaginative and prescient of a dream photograph shoot they’ll’t execute due to in depth coordination and value. Utilizing Aptitude, they add the uncooked product pictures to the canvas, discover the props they want, and roughly replicate their photograph shoot on the platform.
Bandholz: Aptitude appears poised to scale.
Friedman: It’s a very massive market. We wish each model on the planet to make use of us in some capability. Smaller manufacturers with funds 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 fee.
We wish as a lot traction as attainable with smaller manufacturers. However we are going to seemingly transfer upmarket a bit, though we’ll by no means be too costly — means lower than $500 a month.
Over time, our AI fashions will enhance, thus bettering picture high quality. Ultimately, we are going to create banner advertisements. Every little thing shall be AI-generated. My solely hope is that people are on the middle of that course of. They direct it as a substitute of a black field algorithm.
Bandholz: The place can individuals join Aptitude and comply with you?
Friedman: The platform is Flair.ai. You possibly can add me on LinkedIn or comply with me on X, @mickeyxfriedman.