If you ever tried to sell school photos using paper order forms and a prayer, you know the grind. Labels, folders, mismatched names, and somehow, always, a parent calling six weeks later wondering where Jimmy’s photo went. The volume photography industry has been clinging to legacy like it’s a lifeboat. And into that chaos stepped PhotoDay, a B2B SaaS platform with zero interest in playing by yesterday’s rules.
Founded in 2017 by Jonathan Dantes, Rainer Flor, and Lisa Mallis, PhotoDay isn’t just streamlining workflows, it’s rebuilding them with AI, cloud tech, and facial clustering so accurate it might give the NSA a complex. What was once a fragmented mess of post-it notes and crossed fingers is now a cloud-native engine built to power thousands of studios nationwide. And now, the team just secured a growth investment from Serent Capital, a move that quietly, but definitively, changes the tempo for volume photography.
Let’s not skip past the origin story here. Jonathan Dantes wasn’t always running a tech company. He’s a former ATF Task Force Agent with time in the trenches of law enforcement and government. So when he looked at the inefficiency in photo workflows, he didn’t write a blog post, he built a company. Joined by Rainer Flor and Lisa Mallis, veterans of product development and high-volume sales, they set out to turn an outdated industry on its head with a digital-first, studio-obsessed approach.
Their solution? One platform, no patchwork. FaceFind® handles image matching with 99.9% accuracy. The Capture App ditches paper forms entirely. The Dashboard App gives studios real-time analytics on orders, performance, and job status. All of it fully integrated with print lab giants like Bay Photo Lab, Miller’s, Reedy, Richmond, and WHCC.
No gimmicks, no VC dazzle. Until now, they bootstrapped. Focused. Grew fast and quietly. But with Alex Kovacevic (ex-ImageQuix CEO) stepping in as Executive Chairman and Lance Fenton at Serent Capital backing the next chapter, the silence is officially over.
This isn’t just about photos. It’s about studios taking back their time, their data, and their profit margins. It’s about parents ordering online in seconds instead of signing a crumpled envelope in the school parking lot. It’s about tech that doesn’t just work, it anticipates.
And while most startups brag about disruption, PhotoDay focused on execution. Thousands of studios. A 93+ NPS. And the kind of platform flexibility that scales without compromise. With this funding, expect expanded AI features, deeper lab partnerships, and a serious ramp-up in market reach.
