Photoroom Secures $43M in Series B Funding, Launches Next Generation AI Photo-Editing Features for Businesses

FEB 27, 2024

BY BALDERTON

The funding round was led by Balderton and new investor, Aglaé, with YCombinator participating.

Balderton previously led Photoroom's Series A. The new round brings the company's total funding to $64 million.

Photoroom was founded in 2019, and over the past 4 years has carved out a niche in the commerce photography space. Processing over 5 billion images a year, and downloaded over 150 million times, Photoroom is now the world’s #1 AI photo-editing app, available across mobile, web and via an API in over 180 countries.

Balderton has witnessed Photoroom's remarkable journey from its inception, and we are continually impressed by its ability to lead and execute on its user-centric vision. Photoroom's generative AI capabilities are unparalleled, and we have no doubt that they will continue to lead the way in this rapidly evolving landscape.

Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner at Balderton

Watch Balderton Partner, James Wise, in conversation with Matthieu Rouif, the CEO and Founder of Photoroom discussing AI, diffusion models, validating real images and supporting entrepreneurship.

Photoroom shattered all expectations. Its unparalleled ease of use became the catalyst for propelling the Barbie Selfie Generator into the digital spotlight, and captivating audiences worldwide.

Cameron Curtis, EVP of Worldwide Digital Marketing at Warner Bros

The announcement comes as Photoroom launches its first foundation model tailor-made for product photography, Photoroom Instant Diffusion (Photoroom ID for short). The first of its kind, Photoroom’s foundation model is trained to master product photography, ensuring that images from different sources look consistently styled as if shot in the same setting.

Eliot Andres (left) and Matthieu Rouif (right), the cofounders of Photoroom

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. Our model has been trained to excel at product photography and can quickly adapt to user needs and feedback. We are not only increasing the speed of our model, but also optimizing for quality, through higher resolution, more detailed images, and a larger training dataset than ever before. As a user-centric AI company, we designed the architecture to make sense for our users.

Matthieu Rouif, co-founder and CEO at Photoroom

Having control over a custom model means that Photoroom’s machine learning team will be able to incorporate new research as soon as it is released. Photoroom’s custom architecture will also increase the speed of image generation by up to 40%. This means users will be able to generate and iterate on its images much faster than on any other visual AI model.

Photoroom is also launching a suite of new AI photo-editing tools that give businesses more creative control over their product images, including:

  • AI Backgrounds: Generate improved-quality. AI backgrounds for product photographs
  • AI Expand: Use generative AI to realistically expand the scene around an existing image
  • AI Images: Create custom images from scratch using text prompts
  • AI Fill: Customize an item or area of your image with AI for more creative control
  • Auto-rotate: Correct the camera angle with AI for more professional images
  • AI Upscale: Enhance the resolution of images for higher quality photos
  • Image Editing API: Businesses can use Photoroom’s API to generate and edit hundreds of images in seconds

For small businesses, Photoroom’s new foundation model and features help them create professional-quality product images, by giving users more creative control and flexibility. The company's collaboration with photographers and image providers around the world also ensures a diverse dataset, using images to train the model that have been used with the provider’s consent.

For businesses that create and edit a high volume of images, Photoroom has focused on automating photo-editing workflows for teams. Photoroom’s Image Editing API already lets teams like Smartly, Printify, Faire, Bulgari, and Netflix edit images by the thousands or millions. The API can be integrated into almost any system and brings Photoroom's capabilities directly into its customers' workflows. Over the coming months, Photoroom will also make its newest generative AI features available through the API.

The foundation AI model and subsequent investment marks a significant milestone in Photoroom’s journey to revolutionize AI photo-editing for businesses, and cements Photoroom’s position as a leader in visual AI.

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