Easel is a new startup that sits at the intersection of generative AI and social trends, founded by two former Snap employees. The company has been working on an app that lets you create images of yourself and your friends doing cool things directly from your favorite iMessage conversations.
There’s a reason I mentioned that the co-founders worked at Snap before founding Easel. While Snap may never reach the scale of Instagram or TikTok, it is arguably the most innovative social enterprise since social apps began taking over smartphone home screens. .
Before Apple made augmented reality and virtual reality cool again, Snap paved the way for augmented reality with lenses. Even if you’ve never really used Snapchat, chances are you’ve played around with some crazy lenses on your phone or used someone else’s phone. This feature had a massive cultural impact.
Likewise, before Meta tried to make virtual avatars cool again with massive investments in Horizon Worlds and the company’s Reality Labs division, Snap made a curious move by acquiring Bitmoji in 2016. At the time, people thought that the ability to create a virtual avatar and use it to communicate with your friends was just a fad. Now, with Memojis in iMessage and FaceTime, and Meta Avatars also appearing in Meta apps, virtual avatars have become a fun and innovative way to express yourself.
“I was at Snap for five years. Before that, I was at Stanford. I moved to Los Angeles to join Snap on Bobby Murphy’s research team, where we kind of worked on a range of futuristic things,” Rajan Vaish, co-founder and CEO of Easel, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. He co-founded Easel with Sven Kratz, a principal research engineer at Snap.
But this team was disbanded in 2022 as part of Snap’s various waves of layoffs. The duo took the opportunity to bounce back and continue to innovate – but outside of Snap.
AI as a vector of personal communication
Easel uses generative AI to allow users to create Bitmoji-style stickers depicting themselves drinking coffee, relaxing at the beach, riding a bike – whatever you want, as long as it can be described and generated by an AI model.
When you start using Easel, you capture a few seconds of your face so the company can create a personal AI model and use it to generate stickers. Easel currently uses Stable Diffusion technology to create images. The fact that you can generate images with your own face is both a little strange but also much more attractive than an average AI-generated image.
“Once you submit your photos, we begin training on our servers. And then we create an AI avatar model for you. Now we know what your face looks like, what your hair looks like, etc. » said Vaish.
But Easel is not just an image generation product. It’s a multiplayer experience that lives in your conversations. The startup chose to integrate Easel into the native iOS Messages app so you don’t need to move to a new platform and create a new social graph, just to exchange fun personal stickers.
Instead, sending an Easel sticker works like sending an image via iMessage. On the recipient’s side, when you tap the image, it opens Easel above your conversation. This way your friends can also install Easel and remix your stickers. This is also one of the key features of Bitmoji, as you can create scenes with you and your friend in the stickers, increasing virality.
Image credits: Easel
Easel allows users to create more personalized personal stickers than Bitmoji. Say, for example, you want a sticker that says you’ll soon be drinking cocktails with your friends in Paris. You can use a generic Bitmoji to drink a cocktail, but it won’t look like Paris. (And you’ve seen this Bitmoji many times before.) Whereas with Easel – and thanks to generative AI – you can design the background scenes, locations and scenarios in which your personal avatar appears.
Finally, Easel users can also share stickers on the app’s public feed to inspire others. This can create a sort of seasonality within the app, as you might see a lot of fireworks stickers around the 4th of July for example. This is also a casual use case for Easel, as you can scroll until you find a sticker you like, hit “remix” and send a similar sticker (but with your own face) to your friends. friends.
Easel has already secured $2.65 million in funding from Unusual Ventures, f7 Ventures and Corazon Capital, as well as various angel investors, including a few Stanford University professors.
Now let’s see how well Easel fits into people’s conversations. “We learned two very unique use cases. One is that there is a significant demographic that is not very comfortable sharing their face,” Vaish said. “I’m not a selfie taker and a lot of people aren’t. This allows them to share what they do in a more visual format.
“The second is that Easel allows people to stay in the moment,” he added, noting that sometimes you just don’t want to pull out your phone and capture the moment. But Easel still allows for a form of visual communication after the fact.
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