What Canon, Nikon, and Sony cannot do. Re-inventing Cameras for an AI-world, with Vishal Kumar the Founder of Caira Camera.

0:06We see a huge opportunity to bring the editing to the user and have agents and intelligence do some of that editing for the user based on natural language. Fundamentally, what we want to do is build the camera of the future. And we want to do exactly what Apple Watch did to the watch industry and what Tesla did to the automotive industry. We want to do that to the camera industry. We want to build a smart, connected, intelligent camera that allows people to capture real moments of the real world in the best possible quality. Welcome to Curious Customer, the consumer podcast. This show is for anyone curious about the world of consumer.

0:47From insights, trends, companies, brands and design, we'll uncover the hidden stories from the people at the forefront of consumer industries. The show has a wide range of guests from marketing leaders to startup founders. So whether you're in the world of brand building, or the startup ecosystem, or simply curious about the world around us, then this podcast is for you. My name is Matt, I hope you enjoy the show. Vishal, thank you so much for joining the show. You are founder of Camera Intelligence, a camera built for the AI era. It's effectively a physical hardware camera which integrates with LLMs.

1:24So in effect, you take a photo and then in the background, all these clever different things happen in the edit and in the workflows. And we'll get into that. And before founding this business, you were a data scientist at Sotheby's where you started to create your own content and noticed some of the issues. But I just want to start with the question of why now? And if we take a little bit of a step back and look at the market, you see a market that has relatively slow growth in the camera industry. You see it being full of a handful of incumbents that have equally some slow growth. and you have the smartphone that's come in and taken real market share over the last 10 years or so.

2:06And you look at that market and you go, hey, that is pretty exciting. I want a piece of that. And not only have you come into this market, but you've also decided to launch a new category within it of an intelligent camera. So tell us why now? Yeah, well, firstly, thanks for having me on, Matt. We think that this is the perfect time to be launching a hybrid camera that essentially has the quality of a Sony camera, but the connectivity and computational photography of a smartphone. But in 2025, with the power of LLMs, the intelligence to stitch together really disconnected workflows and processes in the content space.

2:45So when we were first conceptualizing this camera in 2021, a lot of people at the time were saying to us, look, the iPhone's getting better and better over time. And why would people want to buy this camera? And actually, what we found since 2021 is that, yes, smartphones have been getting better, but they've only been getting incrementally better. If you actually go out and speak to any content creator or any business that's producing content for their brand, what they will tell you is that every year Apple releases their marketing campaigns, you know, the iPhone 17 Pro apparently can record Hollywood quality video.

3:30But then people go to the Apple store, they're really excited, they go and buy the 17 Pro, and they realize that actually, the perceptible improvement in quality is so marginal compared to the 16 Pro. Actually, for them, it's not like a huge leap in quality, even though Apple's selling you this big dream. In fact, the sensors and lenses that's on the iPhone 17 Pro is exactly the same that's on the 16 Pro. We've reached a kind of plateau in, I believe, smartphone quality, purely down to just the size of the image sensors and the quality that you get. So whilst this kind of diminishing returns is happening on the smartphone end of the spectrum, we're seeing a lot of people like these, I'm talking individuals, but also So business owners, marketing executives, consumers, travelers, a lot of people graduating from a smartphone into professional cameras.

4:21And the types of people that are doing that are people who take content creation seriously. These are people who are monetizing content. Maybe they're getting a podcast or a video podcast off the ground. Maybe they have an e-commerce business and Black Friday is coming up. and what they're doing is that they're graduating and buying entry-level cameras from Sony, Canon or Nikon because the quality is just that much better but when they do that graduation they realize that actually working with the Sony cameras still in 2025 a real pain and it's not just capturing the content that's a pain because these cameras have a lot of complicated buttons and menu systems it's actually what happens afterwards that's equally as painful all the editing that has to happen in Adobe and Photoshop and Lightroom and video editing is a whole different beast that's different to photo editing.

5:11We believe the time is right now because smartphone quality isn't going to get much better than it is. Apple's already looking to push us off onto other devices like watches and glasses is going to be the next big thing. And we think that smartphone image quality has just basically hit ceiling. So the direction of travel is towards the Sony, Canon, Nikon, those sort of more established brands where they're investing a huge amount into R &D. Is it part of your thesis here that actually they don't have the software capabilities to effectively integrate LLMs? And whilst you're answering that, can you also just give a little bit of a background on these businesses?

5:47I mean, they've been around for so long. How big are they? How do they make money? Are they reliant on everybody buying the next version of the camera comes out on a kind of one-off transaction? Do they have any software parts of their business? Just give a little bit of an overview, please. Yeah, so the camera market, the traditional camera market is dominated by mostly six big Japanese conglomerates. So we've got, in terms of market share, Canon, then Sony, then Nikon, Panasonic, Fujifilm and Olympus. Like these six camera brands own about 90 % market share of all digital camera, interchangeable lens, mirrorless camera units sold worldwide.

6:28They're all Japanese. The executives in these organizations have been around for multiple decades. And they're driving a lot of the product decisions about these cameras. And you mentioned at the beginning that their market was absolutely decimated by the smartphone. And what they are left with, it's the classic Clay Christensen's innovators dilemma. They're left with an audience, a customer base, that wants the buttons to be in the same place. They want the dials and the buttons and the menu systems to be exactly where they are. Their audience wants, they're professional photographers. They want full frame sensors.

7:06They want 30, 40 megapixels. And I think the best analogy, the one that I can kind of parallel, so I can think of is two industries, the automotive industry and the watch industry. So the automotive industry was dominated by, you know, German car manufacturers and other car manufacturers that were using the combustion engine. and then Tesla and electric cars came along and decided actually there's a different way to go from A to B. You can actually use CPUs and GPUs and lithium-ion batteries and intelligence and self-driving and all of this kind of futuristic technology to actually do the same thing which is to go from A to B.

7:44And same with the watch industry. If you look at the Swiss watch industry It was underpinned by craft and by luxury. And there were different mechanisms. You have the quartz mechanism and a whole bunch of other different mechanisms. And all of a sudden, Apple comes along and builds the Apple Watch or, you know, Garmin has a smartwatch. Again, using futuristic technology such as CPUs and GPUs and data and applications and health monitoring and a whole bunch of other things to propel the watch industry forward. It's exactly the same with cameras. They've just been building the cameras the way that they've been building cameras for the last 20 or 30 years.

8:22They're very reluctant to innovate because they have a customer base that requires them and wants them to continue putting those buttons in the same place. And we as camera intelligence, we want to break away from that. We want to build the smart, intelligent camera of the future that doesn't just capture pixels, but also provides a lot of the editing that this individual, this content creator who wants high quality content would do afterwards in Adobe. We see a huge opportunity to bring the editing to the user and have agents and intelligence do some of that editing for the user based on natural language.

8:58Let's go there then. So how do content creators operate today? in terms of bringing editing to the user? Yeah, so I know this firsthand because you mentioned before I was working at Sotheby's Auction House as a data scientist, but as a side hustle, I produced content and I was getting paid for my content. I was producing a lot of video content about my job as a data scientist in the art market, a very niche thing to be doing. And so the kind of decision matrix or the decision I had to go through was that I was working at a reputable brand like Sotheby's. I wanted the quality of my content to be high.

9:33So I went and invested in a Sony a66 mirrorless camera. I bought a Sigma lens. I bought a tripod. I then bought an Adobe subscription, a monthly subscription, which was$100 a month. And I was doing a lot of searching. I would go on YouTube to find out, okay, what was the best camera that I should buy? I had a budget in mind. I ended up spending something like two and a half thousand dollars on my camera setup. But I was trolling through a whole bunch of different reviews trying to understand do I want full frame or do I want APS-C. So a lot of research went into just deciding what camera I wanted.

10:13Then a lot of research went into deciding what lens I wanted. Then I needed to decide what editing tool I wanted to use because Adobe has a video editing tool called Premiere Pro, but Apple has an editing tool called Final Cut and there's another editing tool called DaVinci Resolve and I had to actually actively go and search and find the editing tool that I wanted to shake hands with for the next two or three years in terms of my editing techniques. Then every week I would watch video tutorials by other creators and other YouTubers telling me how to use this software because the software is really complicated.

10:54So this is a typical journey that a consumer or someone getting into content for the first time will go through is that they will acquire high quality tools because obviously they want to level up their content. But then they're also acquiring knowledge by spending hours every week watching these tutorials to actually be able to use these tools. That's typically what the journey that someone getting content will go through. So it's a mess, right? You have all these different cameras, you have to self-educate, that's complex in and of itself. You have all these different tools, you have to learn how to use them.

11:27It's a busy space. When you've looked at it and you've started speaking to content creators and ultimately your customer base, what are the two or three things that they actually care about? Because it strikes me as maybe the marginal difference between a different Sony or Nikon camera, like maybe pretty similar. The difference between the capabilities in Adobe and Final Cut Pro may be pretty similar. Like, what do they care about? What makes them switch to you? Yeah, the overwhelming thing people care about is that they want the quality of the content to be high because high quality content gives off a certain level of perception.

12:00But they want to be able to share that content as quickly as possible and edit that content in the easiest way possible. The reason they come to us is because we give them the quality that they would get from a Sony or Canon camera. And all the assets are immediately on their phone. They don't need to be dealing with memory cards or anything like that. The high quality photos and videos are immediately on their phone. And one thing that we've been doing in 2025, which we think is going to be a game changer in the content industry, is that we've been integrating large language models. We specifically using Gemini at the moment, but we've also integrated editing tools like Nano Banana because we believe that this intelligence baked into the product can essentially, finally, for the first time in two or three decades, bring the editing to the user.

12:54Then by using natural language, instead of these really complicated editing softwares, you can actually just speak to Cairo, which is our camera, and you can say things like, oh, could you make the color grading look a little bit more cinematic? or could you make it look like golden hour? We're now looking to build more agentic capabilities. So you might say something like, if you're a wedding photographer, you could say, take my last 200 photos, go through those photos and give me 10 highlight photos, but make sure you color grade them in my style. And in 90 seconds, this agent will go through all of your photos, color grade it, will give you an album with the top 10 highlights that you can airdrop to the client in 90 seconds.

13:35And then you can say to them, okay, look, here's some highlight reels that you can share on social media today. I'll get you the remaining hundred next week after I've gone through my process. And it can be exactly the same for video as well. So you might record a video podcast and you could say to Kyra, hey, take my last video and give me back three vertical videos with subtitles, but only pick out the highlights. And in three minutes time, you'll get a notification with quick cuts, quick edits with subtitles that you can share onto your stories on Instagram to drum up interest for the big podcast that's going to be revealed next week.

14:07So everything happens on the fly. It's fascinating. There's an interesting paradox where by creating so much efficiency and removing all of that operational hurdle in the background, people end up taking far more photos. They'll spend far more time with your product. Are you starting to see that? Not really. I think we always will give people the option to use a traditional workflow. So if you are someone who's more of a camera enthusiast, you've been using cameras for 10 years or 20 years, and you like the idea of on a Sunday morning having a nice coffee and like bringing up your laptop and like shooting in raw photos and then doing the color grading in Lightroom.

14:46Or, you know, if you're someone who actually does like the process of editing videos because you want to practice, you absolutely can do that with our camera. That option is completely available to you. You can still do your existing workflows. What we're trying to do is build these quick editing buttons, essentially, for the type of audience that we spoke about before, where speed is just really important. We actually want to make people more productive. What we're seeing is that people are not shooting more photos. They're actually making more money. They're taking on more jobs. They're showing their clients, actually, we can turn around photos and videos much quicker than ever before.

15:24instead of being tied down with one or two clients a week, they're actually taking on three or four clients a week. So you're doing all this auto change and auto edit in the background. And I want to say where you draw the line between enhancement and fabrication and how sensitive consumers or people that are consuming content, how sensitive they are to AI edited or AI generated imagery today? We see AI being most helpful in the post-processing step. So recently, we integrated NanoBanana into Kyra, which makes Kyra the first and only mirrorless camera on the market that has NanoBanana integrated inside of it.

16:05This was extremely controversial. There were people across the spectrum who thought this was really interesting and really cool. And there were also people who thought this was not a good idea. The way we think about the generative side of things is this technology exists. No one's stopping anyone from going onto their laptop, logging into Nano Banana, logging into Mid Journey, logging into any other tool and doing a transformation afterwards. So what we're doing is we're giving them the option. We're not forcing anyone to use this technology. We're giving them the option to muck around and play with these tools in the moment when their creative energy and their creative spark is probably the peak during the day.

16:45Why not give people the option to use this technology? There are some people who believe that this technology should be banned completely outright because of a whole bunch of philosophical beliefs about AI, the way it's been trained, etc, etc. We don't think that's a good idea. What we want to do is we actually want to give people the choice to use the technology of the day to express themselves in the most creative way possible. Now, there are definitely some dangers. My perspective on just AI generation is similar to food as well. As a consumer of content, as a consumer of food, when I go into Waitrose or wherever, I do tend to look at the ingredients that are inside of it.

17:28I tend to just do a little bit of eyeballing, nothing crazy. I'm not like a hypochondriac or anything, but I just look at the information that's there. I think we should have something similar to nutrition labels, but for content, especially AI generated content, like on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, there should be some information that lists the model on the company that was used to generate this content. I actually think it's good that society is being exposed to this stuff because ultimately it builds resilience in democratic systems. If this stuff didn't exist imagine when it was used in in kind of stealth you wouldn't be able to tell the difference a lot but i think by actually exposing it to everyone and yeah you know it's a bit discombobulating and it's a bit strange right now we're in a bit of a gray zone but in some ways everyone's building resilience to this ai generation narrative right now no really helpful and clear nutrition labels i like it it seems um seems like a good solution when we think about content i take your point there that you're this is not about volume of content it's about quality and accessing different jobs because you get more time back in your day.

18:35But where are we in terms of that content journey? And what I mean here is it's now easier to take high quality photos, even if you are not a particularly skilled photographer. So the volume of content can increase. Where are we in terms of the path towards peak content, towards consumers becoming so overwhelmed by the volume of content that actually it reduces in its effectiveness? With just the deluge and big tidal wave of AI content, I think people are getting content fatigue. If you are a consumer, if you are a brand, if you're someone who is looking to produce content, content should be viewed as access, not as promotion.

19:15Too many people, when they buy a camera or where they want to set out a podcast, they think of content as a way to promote their brand and to promote a particular narrative, to promote a story, to promote some goods. that's fine but i think increasingly we need to think about content as access and access or you know access to an individual is really important because it builds trust so when people are using our camera or when we think about content we believe that content should be helping people to access an individual access a brand so that the brand can tell a better story about the product in the marketplace that can eventually help them promote.

19:58This is interesting. So you're seeing it really that one of the parts of defense that you can have against AI content creation is telling really human stories because AI doesn't know them. It can't tell them. Are you actually starting to see that play out? Yeah, this is a bit of a spicy take, but there's a lot of AI generated video image companies that are getting funded right now because the premise is that you're so busy as a founder or as an individual that you can't sit in front of a camera and record content. The setup time is so much. You're so busy. You're so focused on other priorities that, hey, use this AI avatar or use this AI generation to generate this content.

20:40And a lot of those companies are getting funded right now, I think purely because it's just scalable and people are giving it a go. But what we find is that in the venture community, the people that are funding these AI generation tools, think 20VC, Harry Stebbings, think Andreessen Horowitz, both of those funds actually doubling down on human-made content and actual studios. They're buying better cameras. They're buying, I saw Harry tweeted that he just expanded his studios. He's like, he's now got three studios in London. So what that shows is the human made content, in person content using high quality cameras and high quality audio equipment is still really valuable because it comes back to the point I was making before access in an AI world is really important.

21:30Harry's not going to like spin up an AI avatar of himself and start doing weekly podcasts about the state of play in the market. We're seeing increasingly, and yeah, there is a paradox, you know, increasingly brands are investing in podcasts and increasingly brands are investing in content. And maybe to some extent, you could argue that consumers will just be overwhelmed by all of this stuff. I just think that if you are generating content in today's world, it should be really considered. Audiences, they want unique insights. I'm really interested in this point around synthetic media content creation, the sort of AI avatar companies that you've alluded to.

22:09So five years from now, and let's say a handful of them, they haven't worked out. What's your postmortem? Is it that point around they are really focused on pushing content towards consumers for promotional purposes and actually consumers get sick of it? I just think the best way to think about it is fast food versus Michelin quality food, processed food versus organic food. The advent of globalization and processed food and Campbell's Soup, Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup was a whole kind of narrative around consumerism and globalization. That's the way to think about AI generated content. AI generated content will exist.

22:47It will be much like buying tinned tomato soup. moments will be always recorded with a video camera with humans in the loop with video editors or creative director making kind of strategic decisions for the brand about why we need to get this guest in why we need to record this guest those are all going to be recorded on cameras but lower stakes perishable content will be offloaded to the ai so we're seeing with things like Synthesia, you know, back office training videos seems to be the thing that Synthesia has found a product market fit for. Great. Cool. But like A16Z just expanded their media team.

23:30They've just doubled down on investing in cinema cameras by Sony with probably cinema quality lenses from companies like Cook. And they're probably still hiring video editors who are really skilled to edit the content. I was actually listening to a podcast with Mark, Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, like the Mark and Ben show. It's all filmed on cinema cameras. And similarly, if you look at Harry's stuff at 20 BC, his latest podcast was all filmed in a studio with cinema cameras, not with iPhones, not with low quality microphones, like studio quality microphones, mirrorless cameras. And so my point is that I think that real life in human content is going to be around for the next forever because people still want to sit down with a person across a table to them because it comes back to that point I was making before that is that content should not just be seen as a mechanism for promotion, but it should be seen as a way to access that individual, a window to that individual's soul.

24:36Synthetic media, I think the main sell is that it's going to replace the camera because people are so busy that they won't record content. That might be true for low stakes, perishable content, but for high stakes, high quality content, I think camera is always going to be in demand. Yeah, I really like that Michelin star versus kind of McDonald's analogy, paying to the two parts of the market. You've mentioned content through your eyes being considered and grounded and i just want to ask how that thought process or philosophy has manifested in the actual product itself your hardware it looks fantastic it kind of looks a bit like an old school like a camera and i'm wondering whether is there something in that around nostalgia around that retro camera feel where actually people who are pointing and shooting with your camera, despite all this AI and LLMs and power in the background that maybe some photographers want to almost abstract themselves away from, that you build a beautiful looking thing that makes them feel very grounded in the work that they're doing.

25:40100%. I think with smartphones, one of the biggest criticisms I have with smartphones, and a lot of people have, is that you just whip it out, it's in your pocket, you just hit the capture button press press and you essentially just capture a moment that you're most likely never going to look at again it's this kind of reflex mechanism with iphones where you're just capturing mundane moments and you never look at them again whereas with our camera yes we've designed it to be retro looking but also extremely minimal there's only two buttons it's got a it's a classic camera look to it. It's made with machined aluminium, but it's not only just in a considered purchase.

26:23It's an extremely considered process. You have to turn it on. You have to mount it to your phone with MagSafe. You then have to bring up the app and then you're then in the moment considering what content do I want to capture today? So it is a considered process, is a V just whipping out your smartphone from your pocket, taking a photo, never looking at it again. Where's the direction of travel for you then in this business? Because you can go down improving the hardware, you can go down improving the software and taking all of that post-production piece away from the content creators. Are you picking any of those lanes or are you going somewhere else entirely?

27:01Yeah, so I don't see this being kind of a niche camera business. I think that's the kind of wedge into a much more ambitious strategy. And also the people who are buying the camera right now are actually buying the camera because they want to upgrade from their phone. These are people with extra income. These are people from the creative class. They probably live in London, New York, Paris, etc. They're traveling around the world to Singapore and Tokyo and to other places, and they want something better than their iPhone. And they want the assets immediately so they can share. So that is very much the current audience base.

27:40We also have content creators, people who are monetizing content, who want to become content creators, who feel really held back by the existing system. And I'd like to give you some numbers. Like last year, 50 million iPhone Pro phones, so regular Pro and Pro Max were sold by Apple, which was the most popular smartphone phone series there is, right? More popular than any Samsung or Android phone combination. That's 50 million of those people. iPhone Pro users are really correlated to camera users. And what we found is that actually 60 % of everyone that's bought our camera is an iPhone Pro user.