Team behind Facetune releases Enlight, a powerful mobile photo editing app to challenge Adobe
Chris O'Brien / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015, Lightricks was best known for Facetune, a selfie-editing hit built on a different bet than Adobe's: one polished mobile app per job rather than a desktop suite. Enlight extended that playbook to serious photo editing on phones, positioning itself directly against Photoshop-era incumbents at a moment when rivals like EyeEm were also experimenting with how editing knowledge reached mobile users (EyeEm's Open Edits had launched months earlier).
The corpus since then reads as validation followed by reinvention: Lightricks raised $60M with Enlight Pixaloop claiming 6M users ($60M raise), then $135M Series C at a $1B valuation led by Goldman Sachs, then $130M Series D at $1.8B across eleven subscription apps by 2021. By 2026 the company split its consumer apps from its GenAI unit LTX — meaning the mobile-first challenger thesis eventually outgrew even its founding category.
First-order effects
- Adobe now faces a credible mobile-native editor from a team with proven consumer distribution via Facetune, pressuring its assumption that pro-grade editing lives on the desktop.
- Mobile photographers gain a single powerful editing app priced and designed for phones, rather than scaled-down desktop software.
Second-order effects
- App-store subscription economics favor Lightricks' per-app model, forcing incumbents to decide whether to unbundle their own suites or defend them — the dynamic later visible in Lightricks running eleven subscription apps simultaneously.
- Success on mobile pulls investor capital toward consumer creative apps: Goldman Sachs' Series C leadership shows the market repriced 'selfie app' studios as platform companies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, creative software stratifies into heavyweight professional suites and focused mobile apps, with unbundled specialists capturing users who never adopt desktop tools — a split that culminated decades later in Lightricks separating its consumer unit from its AI research arm entirely.
The trend: Creative software is unbundling from all-in-one suites into focused mobile apps, with venture capital following whichever model captures the next generation of editors.