Camera Intelligence Raises $2M to Build an AI-Powered Camera That Thinks Like a Professional Filmmaker

September 2, 2025

Camera Intelligence, the London-based AI camera company formerly known as Alice Camera, raised $2 million in seed funding in September 2025. The round was backed by Betaworks, F4 Fund, Next Wave via Flybridge, 7pc Ventures, and Digital Catapult. The company was founded by Vishal Kumar, a UCL Bartlett graduate who developed the initial concept during the UCL Hatchery programme and BaseKX entrepreneurship hub. The funding will support the launch of Camera Intelligence’s LLM-powered camera features to iOS users, which was targeted for autumn 2025, and continued development of the platform’s hardware and AI capabilities.

The content creation market has grown dramatically over the past decade. The combination of social media’s demand for high-quality visual content, the democratisation of creator commerce, and the dramatic improvements in smartphone camera quality have expanded the population of people who create video and photo content professionally or semi-professionally by orders of magnitude. But a fundamental tension remains: the highest-quality content requires mirrorless camera systems with interchangeable lenses, manual control over aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and focus — and the editing workflows that follow. These systems produce significantly better results than smartphone cameras for any application that requires precise control over depth of field, motion blur, low-light performance, or colour science. But they have a steep learning curve that has excluded the large majority of the creator population who lack formal photography training.

Camera Intelligence is addressing this by integrating a large language model-driven AI assistant directly into the camera system. The AI assistant can accept voice commands — “make the background blurrier,” “add a warm colour grade,” “focus on the person on the left” — and translate them into the specific camera parameter adjustments that a trained photographer would make manually. This removes the requirement for technical knowledge about aperture values, colour temperature, or focus modes: the creator describes the visual outcome they want, and the AI figures out how to achieve it. The system also enables on-device editing — colour grading, style selection, basic compositing — directly within the camera, removing the need to transfer footage to a computer and work through complex editing software before sharing content.

The implications are significant for the creator economy. The gap between the visual quality achievable with a smartphone and what’s possible with a mirrorless camera has, until now, been bridged only by training or by hiring skilled operators. Camera Intelligence’s platform effectively democratises the mirrorless camera for a creator audience that has been locked out of its quality ceiling by the learning curve. Digital Catapult CEO Susan Bowen described Camera Intelligence as “a breakthrough solution harnessing AI and advanced imaging technology to drive deeper innovation in the creator economy.”

The investor base reflects the platform’s position at the intersection of hardware innovation and AI software. Betaworks is a New York-based venture studio and fund that has backed media and consumer technology companies including Tumblr, Bitly, and Giphy. Digital Catapult, the UK government-backed deep tech accelerator, is a strategic backer for companies at the frontier of digital infrastructure and media technology.

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