Our story
We spent ten years in cardboard. The software got too good to keep.
Lifesizy didn't start as a startup. It started on a factory floor, one traced cutline at a time. Until we automated the part everyone else still does by hand, and realised it was too useful to keep to ourselves.
The road here
Ten years in cardboard, drawn along one cut line.
- 2015
It started with cardboard
We founded KarTent to prove one thing: cardboard can be beautiful, strong, and worth keeping. A decade later it still ships every week. Furniture, displays, stands. Cardboard became our craft.
- 2020
The year the crowds disappeared
Stadiums emptied. Events stopped. So we printed the first life-size cardboard cutouts: fans, mascots, whole rows of people: to fill the seats that couldn't be filled. Demand was instant, and it never really stopped.
- 2022
kartonnenfiguur.nl
We gave the cutout its own home: a webshop where anyone could turn a single photo into a life-size cardboard figure. Birthdays, brands, farewells, grooms who couldn't make it. The orders poured in.
- 2024
The bottleneck was a person with a pen
Every order meant someone tracing the cutline around the photo by hand, then emailing a proof, then waiting. Days per figure. So we built AI to do it in seconds: remove the background, detect the contour, draw a production-ready die-cut line automatically.
- 2026
Too good to keep to ourselves
The engine got faster and sharper than any hand could match. And we realised every print and sign shop on earth is still tracing by hand. So we turned it into Lifesizy: the same instant cutline preview, on any shop's own website, in one line of script.
The founders
Three people who got tired of tracing by hand.
We still run KarTent every day. Lifesizy is the software we wished we'd had a thousand orders ago. So here we are, run through our own engine.
Cas den Braber
Founder & Development
Turns the hand-tracing bottleneck into code. Owns the cutline engine and everything a shop drops onto its own page.
Timo Krenn
Founder & Sales
Talks to the shops still tracing by hand. Ten years of cardboard means he speaks the trade, not the pitch.
Jan Portheine
Founder & Implementation
Gets Lifesizy live in a real production workflow, from first script tag to a cut-ready file on the machine.
Backgrounds removed and cutlines drawn by the same engine that powers thousands of live cutout orders at KarTent.
Put an AI cutline preview on your product page
Your customers upload a photo and see their cutout at true size in seconds, with the production cutline already drawn. Book a demo and we'll show it running on your own products.
One email. We'll show it running on your own products, no obligation.