Rylo came out of stealth today — the company has introduced a small camera and revolutionary mobile app that seamlessly captures everything around you and creates stunning, unique video footage that’s easy to share. The simplicity by which it captures footage and the unusual perspective it offers has the potential to change how people think about capturing and consuming video.
Unsurprisingly, the people behind this remarkable technology spent time at Apple, Facebook and Instagram, companies that continue to define how we capture and engage with content. They’ve built hardware and software products that delight more than a billion people. And they understand that while advancements in video/image quality have historically been driven by hardware updates, the future of cameras and video quality is in software innovation.
That is the premise that Rylo’s co-founders Alex Karpenko and Chris Cunningham have been iterating on for the past few years. We first met Alex back in 2011 when he was working on his PhD at Stanford. He had made some notable breakthroughs in video stabilization by combining hardware and software.
We advised him as he started his first company Luma, which was subsequently acquired by Instagram. And that’s where Alex met Rylo co-founder Chris Cunningham. Chris was also fixated on how to transform video capture and consumption for the better, too. So when the two started to collaborate on Rylo, we jumped at the chance to work with them when the team started building the company in the summer of 2015.
It’s well-understood that people shoot and share more images and video than ever. Smartphones have wonderful cameras. There are action cameras. We even have flying cameras. But turning raw video footage into something fun and original is really time consuming. That’s what makes Rylo special.
Rylo represents a software-first approach. The team developed the software first and designed the hardware around it. It’s a progressive approach that few other consumer companies have dared take. The end-result — Rylo lets people easily capture moments without worrying about pointing the camera or minimizing movement like walking or running. After collecting footage, the software steps up.
In the Rylo mobile phone app, tap anywhere to track a point or object in your video, remove shaking, trim the video to its best parts, and/or speed it up to create a timelapse you can share to Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere else. The software allows you to do all of that in real-time so you don’t end up with hours and hours of content gathering digital dust because it’s too big a chore to go through. Rylo makes capturing and sharing life’s moments simple.
Congratulations to the team on introducing the first Rylo product to the world. We’re excited for the future — to see how Rylo will unlock people’s creativity and help them share their life experiences in new and exciting ways.
