About Visionati
Two friends and a shared belief that creative communities deserve better tools.
Building Tools for Creatives
Visionati exists to help creative communities understand their visual content. Designers, developers, store owners, content platforms: anyone who works with images and needs to know what's in them. One API, multiple AI models, results you can compare and actually use.
This focus didn't happen by accident. It started with two friends trying to build something for designers back in 2007.
The Original Visionati
Josh Ellithorpe and Dale Miller built a Rails-based social platform for designers. User profiles, blogs, image galleries, audio previews, video hosting. It was ambitious, maybe too ambitious.
The Project Winds Down
The platform shut down. But the friendship stuck.
The Rebuild
AI image analysis started getting good. Dale reached out. They talked about what creative communities actually needed: not another social network, but the infrastructure to understand visual content at scale. Josh started rebuilding Visionati at night while working at Apcera by day. The new mission: one API to access multiple AI vision services.
The LLMs Arrive
ChatGPT launched and everything changed. Suddenly AI models could see. Claude, GPT-4, Gemini: they could describe images, understand context, write captions that actually made sense. Visionati was already in the image analysis space, already aggregating services. Adding the new LLM-based vision models was a natural evolution.
What We Do Today
Visionati aggregates multiple AI vision services through a single API. Traditional computer vision (Google Vision, Amazon Rekognition, Clarifai) for tags, OCR, faces, and NSFW detection. LLM-based models (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Grok) to describe images and write captions. You connect once and access them all. Compare outputs side-by-side. Use what works best.
Who We Are
Josh Ellithorpe
Terminal enthusiast who loves to code. His open source projects have thousands of GitHub stars, including s (web search from the terminal) and omniauth-google-oauth2 (used in countless Ruby apps). He also builds AI plugins for GIMP, because creative tools should be open source too. Based in Hawaii.
Dale Miller
20+ years of marketing and business development experience. She served on the board of Lawyers for the Creative Arts and mentors entrepreneurs at DePaul University. Based in Chicago, she handles all of Visionati's business and marketing relationships.
Get in Touch
Questions? Ideas? Just want to talk about AI vision models? Contact us or join the conversation in our community forum.