A team of 9 people earned 10 million US dollars in 2 years! This AI company founded by Chinese is overthrowing the century-old empire of Nikon and Canon

When Kodak declared bankruptcy in 2012, people said it was the ultimate judgment of digital cameras on film. Today, a startup with only nine people is using AI technology to launch the same revolution against Nikon, Canon, and Sony - they don't need a physical camera, but can batch-produce professional-grade portraits, causing the cost of corporate photography to plummet by 90%. Even more shocking is that it took the company only 24 months to go from 0 to $10 million in annual revenue.

Chapter 1: A Technological Uprising Centuries in the Making

"All companies should be redone using AI." This sentence turned into a precise blitzkrieg from the mouth of Aragon founder Wesley Tian.

While most AI photography products are still using "face-changing special effects" to please C-end users, this Chinese engineer who graduated from Stanford has set his sights on a more secretive trillion-dollar market - enterprise-level professional photography. From LinkedIn professional photos to annual reports of listed companies, from medical team images to law firm partner files, global companies pay more than $30 billion for standardized portraits every year. Aragon's AI engine can generate 200 business portraits that meet the corporate VI within 2 hours, and the price is only 1/10 of traditional photography.

This reminds me of the first digital camera invented by Kodak engineer Steven Sassen in 1975. At that time, Kodak executives looked at the blurry 0.01-megapixel photos with disdain, but they didn't know that this electronic ghost would eventually devour the entire film empire. Today, when traditional camera giants are still celebrating the micro-upgrade of full-frame sensors, Aragon's code has quietly rewritten the essential rules of photography.

Chapter 2: Opening up the hidden cracks in the B-end market

There is a "triple law" circulating in the Silicon Valley venture capital circle: when a technology can bring three times the efficiency improvement or cost reduction, it is bound to cause an industry earthquake. The data delivered by Aragon can be called a 9-magnitude technological tsunami:

• 25 million portraits : equivalent to the number of portraits taken by the world's largest portrait photography agency in three years

• 97% cost reduction : The cost per person for corporate team photo shoots dropped from $300 to $8

• 1.2 million users : more than 1/5 of Canon's professional SLR cameras worldwide

• ARR exceeded one million in 4 months : 47% faster than Zoom’s early growth rate

Behind this set of numbers, there is a truth that is ignored by 99% of AI entrepreneurs: while C-end users are screaming for "AI-generated cat-eared girls", B-end enterprises are silently embracing the technological revolution. A director of a multinational consulting company revealed to us: "In the past, it took six months to organize employees from 200 countries to take standard photos. Now Aragon allows the legal team to generate a portrait library overnight, and even the angle of the collar folds is completely unified."

Chapter 3: The "violent window-breaking" philosophy of Chinese engineers

Open Wesley Tian's LinkedIn and you'll see the growth trajectory of a classic Silicon Valley genius: undergraduate degree in computer science from Peking University, master's degree from Stanford, Meta algorithm engineer... But what really made Sequoia Capital transfer the money overnight was his "violent aesthetics" of technology commercialization.

At the beginning of 2022, when Midjourney was still attracting geeks with two-dimensional paintings, Aragon's initial team rushed into corporate studios with laser rangefinders. They found that professional photographers spend 60% of their time adjusting tie angles, eliminating glare from glasses, and unifying background grayscale - these mechanical labors are waiting for a precise AI surgery.

"We trained the model to recognize the light and shadow logic of 200 business scenarios," the CTO wrote in a technical white paper. "When the algorithm can automatically correct the 3° side light required by Wall Street investment banks while retaining the 5% sense of randomness for Silicon Valley startups, corporate purchasing decisions become as easy as drinking water."

This extreme deconstruction of professional scenarios has allowed Aragon to carve out a path in the red ocean market. While competitors are still competing in "generation speed", they have already obtained FDA certification in the medical industry - this means that AI-generated physician portraits can be directly used in official documents for new drug applications.

Chapter 4 The "Tesla Moment" of the Photography Industry

Nikon's latest financial report reveals a dangerous signal: sales of professional cameras fell 22% year-on-year, while enterprise service revenue soared 340%. This is very similar to Nokia's dying struggle in 2010 when it was losing money while investing in Here Maps.

Russ Heddleston, an investor at Aragon and founder of DocSend, pointed out: "The sensor war among traditional manufacturers has lost its meaning. When companies find that employees do not need to appear in front of the camera to get a perfect portrait, the entire photography industry chain will be reorganized in the cloud."

This transformation is giving rise to new power structures:

• Lighting engineers replace photographers: the algorithm team controls the light source database of the "virtual studio"

• CIO replaces marketing director : corporate image management system begins to connect to HR digital middle platform

• Compliance is a moat : Aragon’s customized anti-deepfake watermark for financial customers is becoming an industry standard

What’s even more frightening is that this system exhibits a terrifying network effect. When one of the Big Four accounting firms used Aragon to generate 100,000 employee portraits, its uniquely customized “light and shadow model for the professional services industry” in turn became a digital weapon to crush its competitors.

Chapter 5 When the Shutter Disappears

Standing in front of the giant screen advertisement in Times Square, New York, Wesley Tian asked the team a question: "If the essence of photography is to 'freeze a slice of time', then when AI can generate a 'slice of time' that has never existed, what exactly are we creating?"

Behind this philosophical question lies a fissioning industrial universe:

• Medical AI company begins using digital portraits of patients to simulate treatment progress

• The law firm has transformed the AI ​​image of its century-old partner into a "digital door god"

• McKinsey uses virtual consulting teams to show clients an "ideal talent matrix"

In the capital market, Aragon's valuation logic has long surpassed the scope of SaaS. When the dust settled on the latest round of financing led by Sequoia, Neo partner Ali Partovi said bluntly: "They are building the AWS of business vision - in the future, every digital portrait that appears in contracts, official websites, and annual reports may contain Aragon code."

Conclusion:
151 years ago, Eadweard Muybridge used 24 cameras to capture the decomposed movements of a horse running, and humans have since acquired the magic of cutting time. Today, a group of engineers have reinterpreted this magic with AI - but this time, what they cut is no longer light and shadow, but the visual expression rights of the entire commercial civilization.

As you see more and more "too perfect to be true" professional photos on LinkedIn, you might as well remember this historic moment: the moment the shutter sound disappears is the beginning of the transfer of trillion-dollar industry value.

(The data in this article are all from public reports and official disclosures by companies)