Easel is a new startup founded by two former Snap employees at the intersection of generative AI and social trends. The company is working on an app that lets you create images of yourself and your friends doing cool things right from your favorite guy's iMessage conversations.
There's a reason why the co-founders said they worked at Snap before founding Easel. Snap may never reach the scale of Instagram or TikTok, but it's certainly the most innovative social company since social apps started taking over smartphone home screens.
Before Apple made augmented reality and virtual reality cool again, Snap paved the way for AR with Lenses. Even if you've never actually used Snapchat, you've probably used a weird lens on your phone or someone else's phone. This feature had a huge cultural impact.
Similarly, Snap made an interesting move when it acquired Bitmoji in 2016, before Meta invested heavily in Horizon Worlds and its Reality Labs division to try to make virtual avatars cool again. I did. At the time, people thought it was a feature that allowed them to create virtual avatars. It was just a fad to use it to communicate with friends. Now, with Memoji in iMessage and FaceTime, and Meta avatars 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 Bobby Murphy's research team at Snap, where I worked on various futuristic things. Rajan Vaish, co-founder and CEO of Easel, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. He was a senior research engineer at Snap and he co-founded Easel with Sven Kratz.
However, the team was disbanded in 2022 as part of various job cuts by Snap. The two used this opportunity to bounce back and continue to innovate, but outside of the snap.
AI as a personal communication vector
Easel uses generative AI to allow users to create Bitmoji-style stickers of themselves drinking coffee, relaxing at the beach, or riding a bike. It can be anything as long as it can be described and generated by an AI model.
When you first start using Easel, it captures your face for a few seconds so the company can create a personalized AI model and use it to generate stickers. Easel currently uses Stable Diffusion technology to create images. The fact that you can generate an image of your face is a bit strange, but also much more appealing than your average AI-generated image.
“You provide us with a photo, and we start training it on our servers. We then create an AI avatar model. We now know what your face looks like, what your hair looks like, etc. etc.,” Vaish said.
But Easel is more than just an image generation product. It's a multiplayer experience that comes alive through conversation. The startup chose to integrate Easel into its native iOS messaging app so that you can just swap out funny personalized stickers without having to migrate to a new platform or create a new social graph.
Instead, sending easel stickers works just like sending images via iMessage. On the receiving end, tapping the image opens an easel above the conversation. That way, your friends can also install the easel and remix your stickers. This is also one of the key features of her Bitmoji, allowing you to create a scene with both you and your friends inside the sticker to increase its virality.
Image credit: Easel
Easel allows you to create more highly customized personal stickers than Bitmoji. For example, let's say you want a sticker that says you'll be having cocktails with friends in Paris soon. You can also use a Bitmoji to drink a generic cocktail, but it won't look like Paris. (And you've already seen this Bitmoji many times.) Easel, on the other hand, allows you to design background scenes, locations, and scenarios in which your personal avatar appears, thanks to generative AI .
Finally, Easel users can also share their stickers to the app's public feed to inspire others. This could create a kind of seasonality within the app, for example he would see a lot of fireworks stickers around the 4th of July. This is also an example of his laid-back use of Easel, where you can scroll until you find a sticker you like, tap “Remix,” and send a similar sticker (but with your face on it) to your friends.
Easel has already secured $2.65 million in funding from a variety of angel investors, including Unusual Ventures, f7 Ventures, Corazon Capital, and several Stanford University professors.
Now, let's see how well the easel integrates into people's conversations. “We've learned two very unique use cases. One is that there's a lot of demographics that don't feel very comfortable sharing their faces,” Vaish said. “I'm not a selfie taker, and there are a lot of people who aren't. This allows them to share what they're doing in a more visual format.”
“The second thing is that easels allow people to stay in the moment,” he added, noting that sometimes you don't want to pull out your phone and capture the moment. But easels allow for visual communication even after the fact.