Mikus Opelts and the trouble with a beautiful photograph

Mikus Opelts was looking for an office. This was Riga, around the beginning of his working life, and finding a room meant travelling to see it. Trolleybus journeys accumulated. So did the suspicion that a city full of available interiors ought to offer a better way of inspecting them. Before the robotic camera, the international investors and the Miami base, there was a student trying to avoid another unproductive trip across town.

The solution he pursued was the virtual tour. Let someone look around a building on a screen before arranging the journey. It sounds obvious now, which is one of the privileges enjoyed by ideas after somebody has done the work. For Opelts, it became SkatSkat, a business started in 2010 that would later be known as Giraffe Visual.

More than a decade later, his company Giraffe360 would be making its own cameras and using software to turn property captures into several kinds of marketing material. But the office search is a useful place to begin. It puts the person ahead of the machinery. Opelts’s career began with the experience of being badly served by the available view.

A trolleybus is an unlikely business school

The early enterprise had the resourcefulness of a student operation. A 2016 account of its beginnings described two students offering to film a guesthouse in Kurzeme, western Latvia. The work eventually stretched to property commissions in New York and an office in London. The distance between those assignments was considerable; the basic pitch remained intelligible. Let people see a place they had not visited.

Opelts’s old personal blog preserves a smaller, less polished version of that ambition. There are SkatSkat presentations, posts about panoramic tours and a short CV. It lists sales work, marketing roles and a professional bachelor’s qualification in public relations at RISEBA. The record is pleasingly practical. Somebody had to sell the idea as well as make the pictures.

He was developing a visual business with customers in property and hospitality. A tour could show the relationship between rooms; aerial footage could give a building its surroundings. Each job offered an opportunity to do something more useful than point a camera at an attractive corner. Each also required people to produce it.

The photograph had a geographical problem

A bespoke production company can grow by winning larger commissions, hiring more people or sending its existing team further afield. Those are real options. They also preserve the connection between every new assignment and somebody’s time. Opelts had built a service capable of doing sophisticated work. He wanted a product that could travel with fewer arrangements attached.

In a 2020 account, he described recognizing the limits of the service business after six years. Reaching customers in London, Japan or New York would require technology that could be sent to them. It is an ambition with a distinctly logistical character. An idea can cross a border in an email. A production crew has bags.

He and his brother Madars founded Giraffe360 in Latvia in 2016. The venture carried forward the visual problem while changing who would perform the capture. An agent or photographer could take the equipment into a property. The company’s hardware and software would help produce the material needed afterwards. Opelts was moving his expertise into a process another person could use.

A simple button, several difficult years

There is a particular cruelty in designing something easy to operate. The effort saved by the customer has to be performed somewhere else. In Opelts’s case, that meant years of development. Early subscribers tested a prototype in 2016 in cities including London, Riga, Tallinn, Oslo and Tbilisi. Testing something in several places is already a useful corrective to believing it works perfectly in one.

The design brought photography together with measurement and automated processing. These jobs ask different things of a device. A photograph must look right. A floor plan must describe the space. A tour must let a viewer navigate it. Putting them together gives the developer several opportunities to disappoint the same customer.

Opelts later offered an unusually economical assessment of the early hardware: “The first camera was over-engineered and under-informed.” He had tried to solve too much before establishing what customers valued most. Early commitments to imaging components also made subsequent changes harder. It is a useful admission from someone whose business depends on the idea that technology can simplify work.

He kept production in Latvia. His explanation emphasized proximity: engineering and manufacturing could deal with problems together, with changes made quickly. That choice gave the company more control, even where costs were higher. A camera capable of operating elsewhere still needed people close enough to one another to make it work.

“They capture, we edit, and they’re ready to list.”

Mikus Opelts, 2024

Where the money comes from

The camera arrived with another decision attached. Giraffe360 would operate through subscriptions, joining access to hardware with the processing and software that make its output useful. A one-time device purchase and a continuing service create different relationships. With the latter, the company keeps having to justify its place in the customer’s working month.

Opelts connected that decision to his previous business. “Where your money comes from is how, as a CEO, I end up thinking about business.” The observation is almost disarmingly plain. Revenue determines what management pays attention to. A subscription asks the camera maker to keep thinking about the photographs, tours and plans long after the equipment has been delivered.

The international expansion became more deliberate, too. In 2019, Giraffe360 moved its official headquarters to London following a €1.1 million investment round. Opelts chose the city despite the uncertainty surrounding Britain’s departure from the European Union. He regarded London as a valuable base for a technology business. The company’s Latvian origins did not oblige every commercial decision to stay at home.

The US launch followed in early 2022. Miami became the American base, influenced in part by the presence of Founders Fund, which led Giraffe360’s $16 million Series A that year. By October 2024, Opelts was describing the US as the company’s fastest-growing market. His own public profile now places him in Miami.

The founder learns to leave the frame

Across those moves, Opelts’s job changed as much as his address. His background was photography and editing, and he helped develop Giraffe360’s technology. As CEO, he became responsible for growth and operations. The person who once made the visual work now had to manage an organization making that work possible for others.

That transition includes the ordinary business of persuading people. His December 2022 podcast appearance covered fundraising, networking and geographical expansion, with rejection treated as a recurring part of the journey. The episode’s emphasis on choosing investors and entering markets supplies a counterweight to the hardware story. An ambitious camera does not make those decisions on its founder’s behalf.

The public traces of his working personality span different periods. Early writing concerns virtual tours, revenue funding and the practicalities of building a business. More recent appearances put him beside colleagues, explaining how the camera fits into a larger service. In November 2025, he presented the PRO Camera launch with chief customer officer Samy Jeffries. The demonstration included Content Studio, AI tools and listing marketing.

There is a change in audience here as well. An agent may want a manageable way to produce listing material. A photographer may want to provide more from an existing appointment. Both have a reason to care about what happens after capture. Opelts’s company increasingly addresses that longer assignment: preparing the property for the places where people will encounter it.

Still looking for the next room

On March 26, 2026, Giraffe360 announced a $10 million Series B led by Cipio Partners. The investor described a business with more than 200 employees, offices in Latvia, the UK and the US, and clients in more than 40 countries. Those figures give a sense of the organizational distance travelled from the early guesthouse assignments.

The stated direction was further development of AI-driven property media. The company described a single visit supplying a broad marketing kit, including photography, tours, floor plans, videos and staged imagery. For Opelts, the aspiration now extends through the whole production chain. The image has become the beginning of several deliverables, each intended for a different part of selling a place.

There is a smaller detail worth keeping beside the financing. A 2016 radio profile described Opelts spending weekends orienteering. After a working week concerned with helping people navigate digital spaces, he apparently enjoyed finding his way through physical ones. The symmetry is amusing without requiring it to explain his personality. Sometimes a hobby can simply remain a hobby.

His professional route has been less direct than a neat company timeline suggests. It runs through selling services, developing cameras, choosing a headquarters and learning to lead an international operation. Yet the original question survives: how much can someone understand about a place before arriving? Opelts keeps building more elaborate ways to answer it. Somewhere at the beginning of that effort is a trolleybus journey he would have preferred to avoid.