This Week In XR October 17th, 2024 ft. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, Co-Founder and CEO, Freepik

This week our guest is Joaquin Cuenca Abela, co-founder and CEO of Freepik. Rony is off for the Jewish holiday, Sukkot. Earlier in the week, he launched his new company SynthBee with $20 million dollars of VC money. Also in the news, Nvidia enters software with a high-performing open source AI model, competing with its biggest customers. Our sponsor Zappar now has got a deep-pocketed backer with an exit strategy, Infinite Reality. Freepik CEO Joaquin Cuenca Abela joins us to share the story of his company, Freepik, which started out as an ad-supported search site for free pictures. Today Freepik makes around $100M a year in subscription revenues from their seven hundred and fifty million month unique visitors. For the past two years, Freepik has been leaning heavily into generative AI, and is adding new features, like text-to-video, which he hinted may be coming soon. Freepik hit our radar last year when it acquired the AI upscaling tool Magnific. Thank you to our sponsor, Zappar!Don't forget to like, share, and follow for more! Follow us on all socials @ThisWeekInXR!https://linktr.ee/thisweekinxr Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Om Podcasten

"AI is what XR has been waiting for," says podcast co-host Rony Abovitz, founder of Mako Robotics, Magic Leap, and the AI startup, Synthbee. "AI is what everything has been waiting for," adds co-host Charlie Fink, who writes a weekly column on AI and XR for Forbes. The other co-host is entertainment technology exec, Ted Schilowitz, co-founder of Red Camera. The podcast starts with a hot take on the week's top tech news, followed by industry guests.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.