A short blog to help you understand if Polarr is a good fit for you.

Hey, students, fresh grads, or experienced industry veterans and PhDs from all corners of the world. This is Borui and Derek, founders of Polarr, and we're making creative A.I. for everyone 🤖.

This blog has an estimated read time of 10 minutes. If you don't think Polarr is a good fit today after reading, things might change in the future and we will remain in touch. Otherwise, there is a link to an application for you fill out near the end of this post. If you know anyone who might be a good candidate, read External Referral Program.

🏎 Mission Statement


We help you express yourself visually and ignite the creative sparks in others.

🏁 Vision Statement


A world where there is no barrier to inspirations, no judgement to self-expressions, no limit to where creativity can be applied.

🛰 A brief history of Polarr.


Polarr is a Series A stage startup company (see announcement in 2018) based in Silicon Valley. Given almost 6 years since we've founded the company, Polarr is both young and old.

We've pivoted two times over the last 5 years.

When we first started, we thought the future of the company was to make super easy to use professional photo editing tools. We got a lot of traction and users, then we realized the bottleneck of this approach would be an exit of selling to some large public company who's in the same domain and eyeing the same issues we have. That's not what our team was set out to do - we wanted to build a durable and sustainable company. The company grew to 7 employees at this point.

Then, we looked at the technology we had, which we had a leading advantage in edge-computing and offline A.I. modules from our investment in building out our research team and computational photography. We decided to leverage our advantage and pivot to an enterprise company making an A.I. platform for other companies to deploy the same technology we had in Polarr. This required us to build a offline A.I. module platform, and conceptually similar to becoming the "Dolby" for computational photography. We were able to land many large customers and sign multi-million dollar contracts, but one year later we realized the bottleneck of this approach would be a similar fate from our previous scenario of selling the company to some of our largest customers. At the time, Polarr already grew to 15 people and it's no longer an easy task to change the company to a new direction.

However, when we were executing on the enterprise company route, we noticed that our apps were still growing at a steady speed. In early 2019, we discovered a behavior from our app user that eventually convinced us to enter the "now" chapter of Polarr. The phenomenon we're seeing was Polarr's photo editing apps were able to attract young creators, particular in the GenZ demographic to create and share styles. This cohort of users soon became our super user where they saw Polarr as the primary style creation and sharing app. Due to the inherent network effect of style distribution and consumption caused by the creators, our apps start to receive much higher growth than what we expected. Along with our growth we also realized:

  1. The new cultural zeitgeist of GenZ-s who desire their own identities through making their own visual languages that belongs only to each of them individually.

  2. Polarr had become the easiest app to create unique visual styles.