Photoroom, the Paris-based AI-based photo-editing app that has been growing rapidly and targeting online businesspeople and casual users, closed its latest funding round of $43 million at a $500 million valuation, according to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif and CTO Eliot Andres.
We broke the January round news first. It appeared like it would be above $50 million, but it was lower.
The money comes as the firm continues to experience heavy adoption in a competitive industry with Picsart, which has raised almost $200 million, and Pixelcut. Photoroom processes 5 billion photographs a year and has 150 million app downloads (it also has an API and a web interface).
Aglaé and Y Combinator joined Balderton Capital in the round. Kima Ventures, FJ Labs, Meta, Yann LeCun, Zehan Wang (previously of Magic Pony and Twitter), Hugging Face, Disney+ executives, and others were past investors. Since its founding four years ago, the firm has raised $64 million.
Photoroom will utilize the funds to recruit additional workers and invest in R&D and infrastructure. Photoroom employs 50 workers and plans to quadruple that by the end of the year, despite IT sector cutbacks.
Photoroom trains its own models from scratch, unlike many AI startups. The corporation must buy compute power and picture rights from agencies and artists. Hiring will also occur here. It needs additional technical skills to improve model efficiency and operation. One example: The business says its proprietary architecture speeds up picture production by 40% compared to existing visual AI systems.
Rouif said, “The foundation model is the next step in empowering businesses to create amazing product photos without the need to be an expert at prompt engineering or photography.” We’ve taught our model to take great product photos and respond quickly to consumer comments.
Along with its indigenous models, the corporation releases additional features. Photoroom Instant Diffusion, a new tool for creating product photography, was announced at the same time as the funding announcement. Its goal is to create images that look consistently styled for a single seller, regardless of where and how they were shot. It also includes AI-generated backdrops, scene extensions, photos, and more image-editing capabilities. For mass image processing, its technologies can process them automatically.
We’ll update this page if we can speak to Rouif and an investor. They didn’t notify us!
According to Balderton managing partner Bernard Liautaud, “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’s generative AI capabilities are unmatched, and we have no doubt they will lead this rapidly evolving landscape.”
