So far two (Huawei and one undisclosed chinese company.) of Imints customers have paid for a separate integration project before signing a licensing agreement. We don’t know exactly why they do it and not the others but we can always speculate:

I think the reason that some bigger guys are paying for integration projects is that they roll out their own camera software stack. That means both that they do have a team on their side to do the integration work together with and that, that team might have very special requirements on the fashion the integration is done so that it fits in with the rest of what they do with the camera.

Having a dedicated camera team means that getting Vidhance into a phone model is a two step decision.

Having a dedicated team for the camera within the company also probably means that getting Vidhance into a phone model is a two step decision for those customers:

1. Decide to integrate it as one option in their stack. (Decided by the camera team.)
2. Decide to actually include it in the model. (Decided by the product team for the particular model.)

And since they don’t want to spend their development resources integrating Vidhance into their camera stack without having the full attention of Imint and want to do that before the actual decision to include it in a model is done they end up paying Imint for the integration jobb.

We can assume that they end up recouping that money later through some kind of rebate on licenses. In the Samsung case we know that the licenses for approximate the first years volume was included in the price, as an example.