Tuesday, 27 February 2024, Bengaluru, India
The AI-driven photo-editing app Photoroom, which originated in Paris and has been rapidly expanding, has confirmed that it has closed its most recent funding round. According to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who co-founded Photoroom with CTO Eliot Andres, raised $43 million at a $500 million valuation. Photoroom also draws a lot of casual users.
(Image Source: Techcrunch.com)
When the round was announced in January, we were the first to report on it. Although it ended up being slightly less, it appeared then that it would be more than $50 million.
The investment comes as the business continues to see high adoption in a competitive industry with competitors like Pixelcut and Picsart, which has raised close to $200 million. According to Photoroom, their app has received 150 million downloads and processes about 5 billion photographs a year. It can also be accessed through a web interface and an API.
The investment was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and Aglaé, two new backers. Previous backers include Kima Ventures, FJ Labs, Meta, and several angel investors like Yann LeCun, Zehan Wang (previously of Magic Pony and Twitter), executives from Hugging Face and Disney+, and many more. Additional investors are not mentioned. Since its founding almost four years ago, the firm has raised $64 million, including this most recent round.
With the money, Photoroom intends to expand its workforce and keep developing its infrastructure and R&D. While the tech industry is still seeing a lot of layoffs, Photoroom now employs about 50 people and plans to quadruple that number by the end of the year.
To be more precise, in contrast to many businesses developing AI apps, Photoroom has concentrated on developing its models from the ground up. This implies the company must spend money on processing capacity and negotiate contracts with agencies and creators for picture rights. This is where hiring will be involved: To keep enhancing those models’ functionality and efficiency, it is searching for more technical talent. (As an example, the business says that, compared to existing visual AI platforms, its unique design can speed up customer image generation by up to 40%.)
“The foundation model is the next step in enabling businesses to produce incredible product photos without requiring them to be prompt engineering or photography experts,” Rouif said. “Our model can quickly adjust to user needs and feedback because she has been trained to excel at product photography.”
In addition to its models, the corporation keeps releasing many additional features. The funding announcement coincides with the launch of Photoroom Instant Diffusion, a new tool for product photography that seeks to produce images that, regardless of where and how they were shot, look consistently styled for a single seller (i.e., to give the impression that the product images were created in a professional studio). AI-generated backgrounds, scene extensions, AI-generated photos, and many image-editing tools are among its other features. Its tools can also process photographs automatically in one go if you work with them in bulk.
In a statement, managing partner at Balderton Bernard Liautaud said, “Balderton has witnessed Photoroom’s remarkable journey from its inception, and we are continually impressed by their ability to lead and execute on their user-centric vision.” “Photoroom will undoubtedly continue to lead the way in this quickly changing landscape because of their unmatched generative AI capabilities.”
In summary, Photoroom’s recent funding round of $43 million, resulting in a $500 million valuation, signifies a noteworthy milestone for the AI image editor. The substantial investment attests to investor confidence in Photoroom’s capabilities and underscores the rising significance and potential of AI-driven solutions within the image editing industry. With this financial support, Photoroom is strategically positioned to advance its technology, broaden its user base, and establish a more substantial presence in the competitive market. This accomplishment highlights the growing acknowledgment of AI’s transformative influence on creative processes. It paves the way for Photoroom to persist in its innovation, ultimately shaping the future of digital image editing.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
