Twenty20’s Crowd-Sourced Stock Image Service Exits Beta

Need to freshen your stock image selection? Twenty20 has a photo catalog that’s 45 million strong.

And these aren’t your average stock photos; they are crowd-sourced from a community of 250,000 photographers that Twenty20 has rounded up since launching as Instacanvas in 2012.

The original service focused on creating a marketplace for canvas prints of Instagram photographs. The Marina del Rey-based startup, which rebranded as Twenty20 in 2013, has been quietly building one of the world’s largest catalogs of stock images.

Today, the company announced that its stock image service is exiting beta, along with an $8-million round of Series A funding.

The timing is right, founder and CEO Matt Munson, told Marketing Land. More and more, marketers are looking to illustrate their content with real-world imagery. Traditional stock images can look like … well, stock images.

“All the trends in marketing and brand-building are toward people wanting a more authentic message,” Munson said. “We are all spending more time on mobile devices, experiencing content in places like Instagram, Facebook and Google+ and we’re accustomed to this real-world fresh content.”

So Twenty20 has set itself up to broker deals between photographer and marketer. It curates for quality and makes sure photos have the proper legal clearance.

“Our goal is for the photographer to be able to focus on nothing but their art,” Munson said, “and for the buyer to have a level of comfort and knowledge that they are wholly legally secure in the imagery they are using.”

Twenty20 offers several ways to purchase worldwide, royalty-free licenses. The fee per photo is $10, $20 or $50 (depending on size). Monthly subscriptions range from $89 for 10 images and one user to $499 for up to 100 images and five users.