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French startup Zyl has raised $1 million (€1 million) in a round led by OneRagtime. The company has developed an app that uses artificial intelligence to find the most interesting photos and videos in your photo library.
Now that smartphones have been around for a while, many people have thousands of unsorted photos on their iPhone or Android device. And chances are you don’t often scroll back to look at past vacations and important life events.
Zyl is well aware of that. That’s why the company does the heavy lifting for you. The app scans your photo library to find important memories and photos you may have forgotten. It has even registered patents for some of its algorithms.
But identifying photos and videos is just one thing. In order to turn that process into a fun, nostalgia-powered experience, the app sends you a notification every day to tell you that Zyl has identified a new memory — they call it a Zyl. When you tap on it, the app reveals that memory and you can share it with your friends and family.
You then have to wait another 24 hours to unlock another Zyl. That slow-paced approach is key as you spend more time looking at Zyls and sharing them with loved ones.

It’s also worth noting that Zyl processes your photo library on your iPhone or Android device directly. Photos aren’t sent to the company’s server.
Up next, Zyl plans to enrich your collection of Zyls with more photos and videos from your friends and family. You could imagine a way to seamlessly share photos of the same life event with your loved ones, even if they are currently spread out over multiple smartphones.
With today’s funding round, the company wants to improve the app and reach millions of users. Zyl already has impressive retention rates, with 38% of users opening the app regularly during five weeks or more.
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Tel Aviv-based Photomyne, an A.I.-powered app that helps you bring your old photo prints online, has been benefitting from the subscription app boom to the tune of $5 million in Series A funding. Today, the app is used by a million people every month, and 250,000 people pay the $20 annual subscription for the expanded service. This adds a handful of additional features, including the option to build a family website where all your photos are uploaded immediately after being scanned.
There is something of a limited lifetime for apps that convert physical media to digital – at some point, everyone who wants to transition their old media to the web will have done so. Another issue is that some people will make scanning photos a one-time project. They’ll then save all their photos to their own device and cloud storage, and cancel their subscription.
And as those users drop off, physical media will continue to die out.
For those reasons, Photomyne will eventually need to expand into other areas – perhaps scanning other things beyond photos. As it has a couple of patents for things like scanning business cards, documents, and sticky notes, it’s clearly thinking about this, too.
But in the meantime, there’s still an audience of self-appointed family historians, who are making old photos available to their extended families, as well as older folks who grew up in the pre-smartphone era and now want to bring their memories online, too.
By leveraging A.I. technology which runs locally, in real-time, on mobile devices, Photomyne is able to speed up the fairly tedious process of photo scanning using a handheld device. That is, instead of having to focus on one photo – as with Google’s PhotoScan, for example – Photomyne lets you scan multiple photos in a single shot as you flip through the pages of old albums.
It then breaks those up into individual photos by auto-detecting the boundaries.
It also auto-rotates sideways photos, crops the photos, corrects the photo perspective, and saves them in a digital album where you can further filter them, share, or – with the subscription – save locally, backup to the cloud, sync to other devices, or publish to a family website.

The ability to scan more photos in one shot makes the app appealing to those who want to upload their entire collection of old photos to the web, instead of picking and choosing specific photos to import.
In addition, the app’s A.I.-based technology improves over time the more you use it, says Photomyne’s co-founder and CFO Yair Segalovitz.
And soon, the company plans to roll out other advanced features, too, he notes.
“We are focused on a new set of exciting features that we expect to release in the very near future. We intend to offer automatic color correction – such as fixing color decay – and the ability to search interesting photos in our 70 million-plus photo archive,” says Segalovitz.
To date, Photomyne has been downloaded 7 million times and is largely used in the U.S. and in Western Europe, though it’s starting to see growth in China, too.
The Series A round was led by Luxembourg-based Maor, a co-investment tech fund from Philippe Guez and Eric Elalouf. It also included participation from Israeli investors and others from its seed round a couple of years ago.
With the new funding, the company plans to expand its team of 16 to around 25 and scale the business in Japan and South East Asia, in particular.
Photomyne is a free download on iOS and Android, but the full range of feature is only available to subscribers.
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