AI-based video privacy masking service ‘BlurMe’ raised seed funding
South Korea-based ZaraSoft, the developer of Blur.me, a web-based service that masks people’s faces in images and videos in real time, announced today that it has raised seed funding from The Invention Lab. The amount is undisclosed. The Invention Lab will appoint Jae-min Kang as CSO of ZaraSoft to lead the company’s company building.
‘Blur.Me’ is a SaaS-type service that uses AI to automatically recognize people’s faces in videos and perform masking processing such as blurring and mosaics. Anyone can upload their image or video file to the web, and the faces in the file are automatically blurred within seconds. While it may not be difficult for AI to simply find and mask faces, it takes a high level of skill to quickly process hundreds of moving faces on the fly over the web.
“BlurMe looks simple, so you might ask, ‘Aren’t there many existing alternatives?’ But it’s not easy to implement a service that can quickly mask and download large amounts of video faces on the web, and the performance of similar services is relatively very low,” said Kim Jin-young, CEO of The Invention Lab, which made the investment with a company-building support plan. “‘BlurrMe’ succeeds in improving the performance of web-based masking by more than 8 times compared to pure JavaScript.”
” Figma, which was acquired by Adobe, was able to dominate the market because it was able to provide a superior user experience compared to other SaaS graphics tools,” said Jungwoo Seo, CEO of ZaraSoft. “Based on web assembly and WebGL technology, we have succeeded in developing our own masking engine that delivers native-like performance in web environments.”
Jae-min Kang, who joined ZaraSoft as CSO while building Blur.Me early business items, said, “The idea of going global after verifying domestically always seems to be late or difficult because of the wrong direction. From the beginning, we are proceeding with the idea that it should be a global-based SaaS, not a domestic one. In fact, 78% of the users of the beta service that started in December last year are global users, so we are focusing on global demand rather than domestic demand.”
Blur.Me is currently offering its image masking service for free as a beta service, and its metrics are rising quickly, with 3,200 new users and 18,000 photo uploads in March. ZaraSoft will officially launch the image-based masking service in July 2023.
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