The Paris-based startup raised $43 million in Series B funding and announced a new foundational model faster than other AI models at generating images.Eliot Andres and Matthieu Rouif are the cofounders of Photoroom, an AI-based photo editing startup that has freshly reached a $500 million valuation.In 2018, Matthieu Rouif, a product manager at GoPro, hit a wall. He needed to create visuals for the camera manufacturer’s latest video editing app and his designer was on leave.
“What we realized is this is not a product manager at GoPro problem. It's like a half a billion people problem, like people who are selling every day or every week and need good photography to sell,” said Rouif, who sold his last startup to GoPro in 2016Photoroom announced Tuesday that it has raised $43 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $500 million.
To that end, the startup also launched its own foundational model, Photoroom Instant Diffusion, whose speed has increased by 40% and is faster at generating images and backgrounds than other text-to-image AI models, the company said. The model is trained on a curated database of millions of images, some sourced from image providers and others bought directly from artists.
The duo, who were introduced to each other by former colleagues, said they initially faced some technical challenges as they tried to improve the quality and accuracy of their AI model. For the most part, business owners don’t want the details of their product to change while editing. They only want the background scenery to be refreshed, Andres said.