Swedish AI startup Kive raises €1.5 million to help creators manage and share visual content

Swedish startup Kive is building an AI-powered visual content library for creatives, so that filmmakers, designers, photographers, architects, fashion stylists, publishers and e-commerce brands have the software to support their work. EQT Ventures and Creandum just bet €1.5 million in seed funding on the idea. Powered by machine learning, the library tailors itself to the user’s taste. It can sort through visual assets and discern qualities such as lighting, styles, environments, actions, faces, types of shot (such as close-ups), time of day and thousands of other concepts, says Kive. The technology can even recognise human emotions, so users can categorise content according to the subject’s mood. The cloud-based tool was conceived by founder and CEO Olof Lindh, who was working as a film director and moonlighting as an engineer at the time. Lindh says he single-handedly built the beta product on nights and weekends, and this year, as more creatives started using it, he decided to go all in. “As a director in creative environments, I experienced first-hand how powerful a creative library can be, and how great ideas get stifled because they’re difficult to share – which is why I built Kive,” he said.