Announcing this year’s Visual 1st Awards winners

We’re extremely pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Visual 1st Awards:

Best of Show Award: Profoto

Sami Niemi, Partner at Spintop Ventures, and one of the four judges, explained the judges’ choice as follows:

“Profoto has leading products in light shaping (Directional illumination) which are hard to replace just by software or by illumination from the camera device only. We really like how the company has embraced the smart phone camera as a revolutionary new platform for future photography with its even increasing quality and creative capabilities. Profoto's latest smartphone software in combination with their light shaping hardware will take photography to new levels.”

Best Business Potential Award: Mobius Labs

Fellow judge Anna Dickson, Visual Lead, Google Image Search at Google:

“As the world becomes a more visual place and the use of imagery continues to expand across professions, understanding, organizing and leveraging those visuals becomes more important than ever. We were impressed by the work that Mobius Labs is doing in the space of AI and visual content management.  There's an opportunity to grow the use of this technology across any business leveraging visuals today and we're looking forward to seeing what the future holds.”

Best Technology Award: Dotphoton

Fellow judge Marcel van der Heijden, Partner at Speedinvest:

“When a company founded by two quantum physicists and a professional photographer join forces to build an imaging company, we have to take note. Dotphoton is using deep insights into the quantum processes occurring at the image sensor level to create a lossless compression technology achieving compression ratio’s only seen with lossy methods. With Apple now enhancing support for RAW, the volume and size of images continuing to grow fast, and AI/ML image processing use cases becoming more mission critical in B2B, we believe there’s a bright future ahead for the company.”

Special Recognition Award: Snapbar

Fellow judge Andy Kelm, Managing Director, Palmarés Advisors:

“We all appreciated the company’s story of having to pivot with revenues going to zero overnight due to COVID-19. We were struck by Snapbar’s ability to find an unmet need and focus the team to deliver something entirely new so quickly. The early traction of the new product is impressive, and we celebrate the resilient spirit of Snapbar.”

The following companies supported our conference by sponsoring this year’s awards:

Visual 1st Best Technology Award sponsor:

Visual 1st Best Business Potential Award sponsor:

More about Visual 1st 2020