NEW YORK — When Bill Gates founded his second company in 1990, he had an inkling that digital rights for images might be important some day. He was dead-on.

The second and "perhaps the lesser known of the two" companies that the Microsoft chairman founded, as Gates quipped, announced on Wednesday that its revenues grew 20 percent last year, to $140 million. Gates and wife Melinda were on hand for the first annual meeting of privately held Corbis.

Some had expected Corbis to use the meeting to announce plans to go public. But company principals said earlier this week there are no such near-term plans. The topic did not arise at the meeting.

"This is a company I am very proud of," Gates told meeting attendees.

Over the past 13 years, Corbis has morphed from a provider of still photography to a round-the-clock services business. One of the biggest services it delivers is "rights clearance." Corbis negotiates the legal rights for its own and third-party images for its clients with stakeholders, such as studios, publishers and celebrities. In 2001 Corbis acquired the Second Line Search clearance agency to help it build an online clearance service.

Corbis also licenses images itself; assigns photography for its clients; and provides a variety of other services, such as digital-asset management, content management and media packaging.

Corbis is No. 2, second only to Getty Images, in the digital-imaging market. Corbis is based in Seattle and has roughly 850 employees. About 300 of those are full-time consultants.

"Bill (Gates) and I speculated over a decade ago about new opportunities" in the digital imaging space, Corbis CEO Steve Davis told the press, analysts and other guests on hand for the Corbis meeting. Before joining Corbis, Davis practiced law with Preston, Gates & Ellis (where Gates' father is a partner), specializing in intellectual property issues.

"The market has validated our approach," Davis said, claiming that Corbis' revenues in 2003 were four times that of the industry the company serves. "There's a demand for more than a vending machine for digital photography," Davis continued, explaining the company's services focus.

Davis said Corbis is projecting that it will grow revenues by another 20 percent in 2004, and will sustain that momentum for the foreseeable future. In the coming year, Corbis plans to expand further into Europe and Asia; enrich its existing image collection; and grow its emerging technologies/services business by 50 percent. Like it did last year, Corbis plans to waive $1 million worth of image licensing fees for nonprofits and their ad agencies as its primary philanthropic effort.

During the hour-plus annual meeting, Davis itemized a number of Corbis' "firsts." He said that Corbis was the first company to offer digital copyright registration and a content-protection scheme for its artists. He claimed the company is the leading provider of digital images on cell phones and was first to provide digital-image kiosks.

It's not just on the digital-rights front where Corbis and Microsoft are adopting parallel strategies. Corbis also is learning the ropes of providing services on a subscription basis, the same way that Microsoft is doing with Software Assurance, MSN and other products/technologies.

Corbis is selling digital images through subscription partnerships, allowing them to be displayed on plasma TVs and other digital displays, Davis explained.

"That (digital image subscriptions) is something Bill (Gates) considered when he founded the company," Davis noted.

And with Microsoft increasingly emphasizing photo-sharing and photo/video "experiences" as key components of its current and future Windows, MSN and other products, there are other potential synergies, as well. At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Gates demonstrated a number of digital-photo experiences under development by various Microsoft teams.