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OCUS
Sourcing photography at scale for brands
- 201-500 employees
- B2B
- Marketplace
- Marketing
- Content
- Digital Media
- API
- Arts-et-Métiers, Paris, France
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Company mission
To help brands scale, and help photographers build sustainable careers.
Our take
The growing freelancing economy has led to a rising number of successful platforms that connect clients with gig workers. In the photography field, we’re seeing this model applied to specific niches such as event photographers (Canon’s Image Connect), or women-only photographers (The Luupe), for example. OCUS is honing in on the fast-turnaround, high scale kind of visual assets required by global brands.
Among their clients are Estée Lauder, Grubhub, Google, and Uber Eats. Demand from these clients is big, with Uber Eats producing 50,000 photos every month. Operating at scale is only a lucrative approach if a strong margin can be made after paying freelancing talent. It’s not clear that OCUS has arrived at the right balance here yet.
A number of professional photographers online report a host of issues, so it seems there are wrinkles to iron out still in OCUS’ approach, which may hamper efforts to expand. Moving forwards, they will be using recent funding to invest in product development, engineering, and international expansion.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Funding (2 rounds)
Apr 2021
$21.1m
LATE VC
Feb 2017
$1.8m
SEED
Total funding: $22.9m
Leadership
Thibaud Lemonnier
(CEO)Founded OCUS in 2016.