Season’s Greetings from Imint

2021 turned out to be another good year for Imint, with strong revenue growth, and many reported quarters with healthy profitability. This is a very rewarding sign, as it shows that we are turning our skills and dedication into real, measurable value. The nice thing with creating value this way, is that it is not a zero sum game – the fruits of our hard work benefits not only ourselves, but our customers, who can provide greater products, it brings more opportunities to our partners, and our shareholders have enjoyed a positive share price development during 2021. And let’s not forget the hundred of millions of end users, who – many probably unknowingly – have felt the satisfaction of getting that great video clip from their smartphone. We are storytelling and social creatures, and empowering millions of stories to spring to life, and being shared with friends and stored as precious memories, is utterly rewarding.

2021 was also the year when we started to put pieces together to continue our long term growth. New talents have joined Imint, both in our Swedish headquarters and in our Asian teams. We are continuously hiring, and are determined to keep Imint a great place to work, not least for top notch engineers that thrive in the frontline of technology and working in teams with other brilliant minds. We have also strengthened important partnerships. We will certainly continue this growth in 2022. Why this ambition to grow in our capabilities to build great products and solutions?

The answer is simply that we believe our journey has just started, and in a world of prolific camera sensors, connected camera-centric devices, and a video-first social interaction landscape, we have so many opportunities to contribute.

One example close to my heart is our success in 2021 working with innovation leaders in the field of AR glasses and helmet-worn smart displays for frontline workers, such as RealWear and Rokid. Certainly the pandemic restrictions on physical travel have propelled this, but the longer term trend would be unavoidable – we are entering a world where our physical presence gets less important and our individual skill sets can be applied on a global scene. Wearing smart glasses, a local service technician can co-operate smoothly with a product expert on the other side of the planet, to solve mission critical service of machinery. This adds not only commercial value in terms of cost savings, but also reduces human stress as well as reduces our carbon footprint as the need for long travels gets dramatically reduced. From here, and continuing with this example, we can also see how remote experts can operate machinery directly, like remotely-controlled vehicles, drones and other robots – getting humans out of harms way in hazardous jobs found in mining, forestry, infrastructure inspections, etc. The role of cameras, and high-grade live video quality for this to succeed is obvious. This is about getting sense from the sensors.

Along those lines, and albeit a bit more futuristic, is the concept of a Metaverse, where the borders of human social interaction in the physical and digital world gets blurred. Very human traits like trade and commerce are likely to be early adopters, and in ten years time our social habits are likely very different (similar to how mobile internet and smartphones has changed our lives the last decade). Albeit AI capabilities will certainly continue to accelerate, at the end of the day it is our hundred-thousand year old primate brain that will both guide this (and to some extent be exploited). A key sensor input to the human brain and our perception and thus cognition is visual. I am humble enough to not give predictions on how the world will look in ten years time, but I am more confident in this forecast: visual sensors (i.e. cameras) will be an instrumental bridge between the physical and digital world, and smart software needs to translate enormous technology capabilities and data into humanly digestible and comprehensible input. This is about getting senses from the sensors.

I want to end this note with a big and warm thanks to all my fantastic colleagues, our great partners and industry friends, our trusting customers, and all our financial backers. Thus the sum of all this confidence shown us from all directions is truly heartwarming, and as a promise in return – we will do our very best to make 2022 yet another ground-breaking year!

Andreas Lifvendahl, CEO Imint Image Intelligence AB