Photoroom, the AI-based photo editing app from Paris that has grown like a weed targeting people who do business online while also attracting many regular users, confirms it has closed its latest round of funding. Did: $43 million for $500 Photoroom was valued at $1 million, according to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who co-founded it with CTO Elliott Andres.
We first reported that this round was underway in January. At the time, it looked like it would be more than $50 million. In the end it was a little lower.
The funding comes as the company continues to see high adoption in a highly competitive market with other players such as Picsart and Pixelcut, which have raised nearly $200 million. According to Photoroom, it currently processes around 5 billion images a year, and its app has reached 150 million downloads (also available via API and web interface).
Balderton Capital led the round, with new backer Aglaé and previous backer YCombinator also participating. Other investors were not disclosed, but previous backers include Kima Ventures, FJ Labs, Meta, and executives from Yann LeCun, Zehan Wang (formerly of Magic Pony and Twitter), Hugging Face and Disney+. Contains many angels. This latest round brings the total amount raised by the company, which was founded about four years ago, to $64 million.
Photoroom plans to use the funding to hire more people and continue investing in research and development and infrastructure. While we're still seeing mass layoffs across the tech industry, Photoroom currently has around 50 employees and hopes to double its workforce by the end of this year.
Specifically, unlike many startups building AI applications, Photoroom focuses on training its own models from scratch. That means the company will need to invest in computing power and do image rights deals with agencies and creators. This also applies to employment. The company is seeking more technical talent to continue improving the efficiency and operation of these models. (Case in point: the company claims its custom architecture speeds up image generation for users by up to 40% compared to other visual AI platforms.)
“Foundation Models is the next step in enabling companies to create great product photos without needing to be rapid engineering or photography experts,” Ruif said in a statement. “Our models are trained to excel at product photography and can quickly adapt to user needs and feedback.”
In addition to its homegrown models, the company continues to roll out a number of new features. This funding announcement coincides with Photoroom Instant Diffusion, a new tool for creating product photos. This tool is intended to create images that look like a consistent style for a single seller, regardless of where and how they were taken (basically, it is designed to create images that look like the following) for a single seller: produced in a professional studio). Other features offered include AI-generated backgrounds, scene enhancements, AI-generated images, and numerous image editing tools. If you work with a large number of images, the tool can also automatically process them all at once.
We would like to speak directly with Rouif, and preferably the investors, and will update this post once we hear back. (They didn't contact us in advance!)
“Mr. Balderton has watched Photoroom's incredible journey since its inception, and we continue to be impressed by their ability to lead and execute on our user-centric vision.” Bernard RiotauBalderton Managing Partner said in a statement. “Photoroom's generative AI capabilities are unparalleled, and we have no doubt that it will continue to lead the way in this rapidly evolving landscape.”