Lumi.Media and the global ambition of creative technology

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Lumi.Media co-founder and CEO Karen Dewey has spent decades working or managing large teams on television, from news and current affairs to morning TV and big, fast-moving and rapidly evolving reality TV productions.

It’s not a bad vantage point to get to grips with all the moving parts of the production while tending towards the nuances of the narrative and the integrity of the narrative.

Lumi is a software platform for the television production industry. It is a software-as-a-service designed and built in Australia but aimed at a global market. It is the only platform that brings together all the silos of workers that make up the great television, film and other creative industries.

The company was founded in 2015 by Ms. Dewey and her brother Neil Dewey, a software architect, who is now the chief operating officer of Lumis and co-founder Stuart Campbell, the company’s chief technology officer.

It is a pioneer among the nations’ fast growing CreativeTech companies, a thriving industry that supports and stems from Australia’s sophisticated film, television and video game industries.

In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Karen Dewey talks about the giant leap from a fairly comfortable job to leadership at a startup, building a business, and in the process creating a new product category.

Lumi software is disrupting the creative industries in the classic startup way. It’s a new class of products that allows you to make better productions faster and cheaper. This is the best, fastest and cheapest startup mantra.

The arrival of cloud technology, ubiquitous storage, low-cost computing, mobility, wireless, and bandwidth have all come to enable the application of a platform in the challenges of large-file multimedia production. .

It allows visibility into all moving parts in a production from planning (making sure the right people are in the right place at the right time) to moving versions and changes, connecting field teams with post production in a way that provides the context.

I just thought, wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could move things through the one system from the moment they started [in a production]Ms. Dewey said.

He started sketching the idea with his brother Neil. He came back to me and told me that you are on something.

There is nothing out there that does what you are suggesting and what you are suggesting is a really good idea and could be applied in all ways across the board. This is really where we started.

I was in a fairly comfortable job. But we saw an opportunity to really change the way things are done to make things better, make things faster, and make things cheaper. It is precisely there that Lumi was born.

It was a wild ride. Lumi took money from industry vendors and private investors. The company is chaired by Nuix founder and high-profile startup investor / mentor Eddie Sheehy, which in itself is an indicator.

The company was able to help fund construction of the product during its pre-revenue phase through a Screen Australia grant, the first and only time the organization has funded the software. Screen Australias’ job is not to create startups.

Karen Dewey, CEO of Lumi.Media

But a platform that could make an industry difference in making Australian productions more globally competitive was enough.

It was huge for us in terms of credibility as they searched the world and saw that it was innovative and could really simplify our industry, Ms. Dewey said.

As the product was refined, the company brought in six pioneering partners also during the pre-revenue phase, these were large manufacturing partners such as Australias Got Talent during which Lumi was able to attract two separate grants for the acceleration of commercialization.

The company is now on track, with business customers in Australia and overseas and clear ambitions for its future.

We would say our ambition is to become the ubiquitous solution around the world, Dewey said.

We started here in Australia and would be reasonably known among Australian production houses. Our Australian partners are now helping us achieve [customers] in the United States, the United Kingdom and Asia. We have UK customers coming on board now.

Global expansion is absolutely where we intend to go from here.

do you know more? Contact James Riley by email or signal.

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