French gen AI startup Photoroom has raised a $43m Series B that brings the company’s valuation to around $500m.
The round has been led by Balderton Capital and French VC Aglaé Ventures, with support from Y Combinator, bringing total funding for the company to $64m.
Photoroom develops a photo-editing platform that’s been used to promote high-profile events ranging from the Barbie movie to Taylor Swift’s latest album release.
With this fresh injection of cash, the startup plans to increase the capabilities of its AI model, which it builds in-house, by investing in more specialised chips for AI training. It also says that it will improve the quality of its dataset by inking deals with top image providers and photographers.
This will also require hiring top talent, and the startup is planning to double the size of its 50-people team by the end of 2024.
The YC alumni's generative AI model can remove and replace photo backgrounds. The tool has proven particularly popular among small businesses with limited marketing resources, who can use the technology to create studio-quality photos for their products.
But the company’s product has also attracted major brands such as Shopify, Netflix and Warner Brothers, which have integrated Photoroom’s API directly into their websites to generate product images.
Growing at pace
Although only four years old, Photoroom has already seen impressive growth — and is one of few companies in the generative AI space that’s managed to gain significant traction for a commercial product.
“We are not only increasing the speed of our model, but also optimising for quality, through higher resolution, more detailed images and a larger training dataset than ever before,” said Photoroom cofounder and CEO Matthieu Rouif.
The app has been downloaded 150m times, according to the company; and subscriptions are generating €50m in annual recurring revenue, making the startup profitable.
Last September, Andreessen Horowitz published a report called “How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?”, which ranked Photoroom sixth on the list. That was two slots higher than Hugging Face, an AI startup by French founders based in New York that raised $235m this past summer.
Warner Brothers used Photoroom to promote the Barbie film last summer, allowing users to generate posters of themselves with the film’s branding as a background. The technology was also integrated into Taylor Swift’s website to let fans create versions of her album cover featuring their own faces.
