Liquid Interactive has launched with CAD $700,000 in pre-seed funding from AXL and released its first product, Liquid Photos.
The Toronto venture was incubated at Canadian AI venture studio AXL before spinning out as a standalone company. It was co-founded by Sasha Ivanov, Chief Executive Officer, and Ben Pearman, Chief Technology Officer, who previously co-founded Maple Scan, an iOS app that recorded more than 130,000 downloads, according to the company.
Its debut app focuses on the iPhone camera roll. Liquid Photos turns still images into interactive visuals that users can swipe through, pull apart, and explore.
The launch reflects a broader effort by startups to move AI products beyond text prompts and chatbot-style interfaces. Liquid Interactive is betting that visual, touch-led formats will play a larger role in how people use AI tools.
According to the company, the app can reconstruct a route from a sequence of hiking photos, create interactive views of objects from a flat image, and answer questions about an album by generating visual explanations from the images. Experiences created in the app can also be shared on the web or exported as video for social media.
Before the public release, early demonstrations of Liquid Photos on X and Instagram drew more than 1 million views, according to the company. The startup added that the demonstrations also drew engagement from people at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Apple, and Adobe.
Origins
Ivanov and Pearman developed the venture inside AXL, where Ivanov worked as Lead Prototyper and Pearman as an engineer. AXL positions itself as a venture studio focused on turning AI research into commercial businesses in Canada.
The funding gives Liquid Interactive early backing as it looks for a market for a different kind of AI interface. Pre-seed rounds of this size are often used to refine products, test demand, and support small teams through an initial launch period.
Liquid Interactive's approach centres on images rather than text boxes. Instead of asking users to write prompts and read responses, the app is designed to let people navigate content by swiping, tapping, and moving through visual elements.
Ivanov framed the launch as an attempt to rethink familiar patterns of computer use. "For 30 years, the way we use computers has barely changed - we type, we tap, we scroll," said Sasha Ivanov, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Liquid Interactive.
"Liquid Photos offers the first glimpse of something different, where you reach into a photo and move through it. Today, that makes your camera roll feel alive. In the future, it means anyone can build a rich, interactive experience without writing a line of code."
Applied AI
AXL said its support for the company reflects a view that value in AI will increasingly come from products built on top of underlying models rather than from the models alone. That view is shared by a growing number of investors and founders seeking commercial uses that can stand out in a crowded market.
Daniel Wigdor, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AXL, linked the investment to that thesis. "The companies that matter from here won't be the ones with the biggest model. They'll be the ones that invent new ways for people to interact with it," said Daniel Wigdor, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, AXL.
"That's the applied layer, and it's about to produce the most important companies of this generation. We've watched Sasha and Ben build a category-defining app with Maple Scan before, and we're confident that they can do it again, this time at a scale that could define how everyone creates content with AI."
For now, Liquid Photos is the company's only product. Liquid Interactive has also outlined a broader plan to build more tools on the same technology, including software for brands, agencies, and creative teams, though those products have not yet been released.
That leaves the startup entering a competitive field where consumer AI apps must show that users will return after the novelty fades. Its early test will be whether interactive photo experiences can become a regular habit rather than a short-lived social media curiosity.
Liquid Interactive is based in Toronto.