Founded in 2017, Auckland-based Narrative helps professional photographers with tools including a website builder and Narrative Select, an AI-based tool that identifies the best frames from a shoot, cutting down the amount of time it takes to go through hundreds or thousands of shots.

“Narrative’s products have dramatically changed my workload as a photographer by saving days if not weeks of time on editing photos and marketing my business,” said Nicole Ashley. 

“We are pleased to announce our USD$2.58 million seed raise to scale our artificial intelligence-powered photo selection tool to millions of photographers worldwide. The round was led by Founders Fund with Icehouse Ventures contributing.”

Our first photo-blogging service, Publish, scaled organically via word-of-mouth to wedding photographers around the world. Today, tens of thousands of portrait, lifestyle, wedding, and influencer photographers have used Narrative Publish to improve their photography blogs’ aesthetic and SEO - the lifeblood of marketing efforts for freelance photographers. Photographers pay an annual subscription to use Publish.

Our newest product, Narrative Select, uses machine learning to label the desirability of a photo, initially focusing on attributes of human subjects and focus of the image. Photo subjects with partially-closed eyes are flagged by the technology as desirable or undesirable in a matter of seconds. The product’s machine learning models are able to detect image attributes, like closed eyes or an unfocused picture, with 98% accuracy. Typically, Select will apply warning labels to the worst images — usually around 30% of any given batch of photos — dramatically speeding up the editing process for photographers who would otherwise have to sift through thousands of poor-quality images. 

Read more about the announcement here