French startup PhotoRoom has raised $19 million in Series A funding. The company has developed a popular photo editing app for e-commerce providers and small businesses. In particular, it helps you remove the background behind the items you’re about to sell to make photos look more professional. Balderton Capital is leading the Series A round, with angel investors from Facebook, Hugging Face, and Disney+ also participating. Existing investor Adjacent is also putting more money into the company.
photo room isn’t the only app that helps you remove backgrounds from your photos. Another popular app in the App Store’s “Graphics & Design” category is Pixelcut, and more common apps like Picsart also have the ability to remove backgrounds.
But PhotoRoom focuses on one niche in particular – small businesses that resell items on eBay, Poshmark, or Depop. With just a few taps you can process a batch of photos and create images that are ready to use. This can help them save a lot of time and sell more products.
Behind the scenes, PhotoRoom uses deep learning to identify different objects and elements in a photo. A flat photo becomes a multi-layered image, which means users can remove the background of the photo, blur it out, or replace it with something else entirely. The same technique can also be used to retouch an image and remove unwanted objects.
PhotoRoom has a huge library of background templates and helps to export images in different formats, taking into account the limitations of each platform. And it works so well that the company has managed to attract 40 million downloads on iOS and Android. There are 7 million active users per month, and hundreds of thousands of users pay a subscription fee to unlock all the features of the app. The current cost is $9.99 per month or $69.99 per year.
Next, PhotoRoom wants to bring generative artificial intelligence to its app, starting with steady proliferation. That’s why it’s raising money, as the company is already profitable with its current team.
“Until now, we grabbed an object and then erased the background. But then users have been looking for a background to put the object back in front of the template,” co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me.
With text prompts, PhotoRoom will generate a photo of a marketing product based on your object. The feature will be available in beta for some users at first. It will be gradually rolled out to all users.
“By paying close attention to user needs, Matthieu and Elliott have created a product with a difference. Bernard Liautaud, a partner at Balderton Capital, said in a statement, “The importance of online photography is huge and PhotoRoom has both the traction and the ambition to be the market leader.
