Photoroom, the Paris-based AI-based photo-editing app that has grown like a weed targeting people who are active online while attracting a lot of casual users to boot, has confirmed that it has closed its latest round of funding: $43 million with a $500 million valuation, according to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who co-founded Photoroom with CTO Eliot Andres.
We were the first to report that the round was in the works back in January. At the time, it looked like it would be more than $50 million. in the end it ended up a little lower.
The funding comes at a time when the company continues to see high adoption in a fairly competitive market, with other players such as Picsartwhich has raised nearly $200 million, Pixelcut. Photoroom said it currently processes about 5 billion images a year, with its app exceeding 150 million downloads (it’s also available via API and web interface).
Balderton Capital led the round with new backer Aglaé and previous backer YCombinator also participating. Other investors are undisclosed, but previous backers include Kima Ventures, FJ Labs, Meta and several angels such as Yann LeCun, Zehan Wang (ex-Magic Pony and Twitter), Hugging Face and Disney+ executives and more. This latest round brings the total 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 to invest in its R&D and infrastructure. At a time when we’re still seeing a lot of layoffs in the tech industry, Photoroom has about 50 employees now and wants to double that by the end of this year.
In particular, unlike many startups in building artificial intelligence applications, Photoroom has focused on training its own models from the ground up: this means that the company has to invest in computing power, ink agreements for image rights from companies and creators. This is also where recruitment will come into play: it is looking for more technical talent to continue to improve the efficiency and operation of these models. (Example: the company claims its custom architecture speeds up image creation for users by up to 40% compared to other visual AI platforms.)
“The foundation model is the next step in empowering businesses to create stunning product photos without needing to be an expert in direct engineering or photography,” Rouif said in a statement. “Our model has been trained to excel in product photography and can quickly adapt to user needs and feedback.”
Along with its domestic models, the company continues to develop a number of new features. The funding announcement coincides with a new product photography tool, Photoroom Instant Diffusion, which aims to create consistently styled images for a single seller, regardless of where or how they were taken (essentially so that product images look like with these they were produced in a professional studio). Other features it offers include AI-generated backgrounds, scene extensions, AI-generated images and a wealth of image editing tools. For those working with images in bulk, its tools can also automatically edit them in one go.
We hope to speak with both Rouif personally and an investor and will update this post when and if we can reach them. (They didn’t contact us in advance!)
“Balderton has seen Photoroom’s remarkable journey since its inception and we are continually impressed by his ability to guide and execute on their user-centric vision,” he said. Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner at Balderton, in a statement. “Photoroom’s AI production capabilities are unparalleled, and we have no doubt they will continue to lead the way in this rapidly evolving landscape.”
