PhotoRoom raises $19 million following 40 million app downloads

PhotoRoom, a French business, has secured a $19 million Series A funding round. The business creates a well-known photo-editing tool for small businesses and online retailers. In order to make your images appear more professional, it specifically helps you remove the background from the items you’re preparing to sell.

The Series A round is being led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Disney+, Hugging Face, and Facebook angels. Adjacent, a current investor, is also investing more money in the business.

Other apps exist that can assist you in erasing photo backgrounds besides PhotoRoom. Pixelcut is another well-liked app in the “Graphics & Design” category on the App Store. Apps with more functionality, like Picsart, also have background removal options.

But PhotoRoom has concentrated on a certain market segment — small enterprises who sell goods on eBay, Poshmark, or Depop. These industry specialists can quickly edit a number of photos to produce images that are suitable for use. They can spend less time on it and sell more goods as a result.

Behind the scenes, PhotoRoom use deep learning to recognize various objects and visual features. A flat photo is transformed into a multi-layer image, allowing users to completely remove or blur the background of the image. The same approach can be applied to image retouching and object removal.

With the limitations of each device in mind, PhotoRoom enables you export photographs in a variety of formats and offers a sizable library of background templates.

And it’s been working remarkably well, as evidenced by the 40 million downloads the company was able to garner for iOS and Android. There are 7 million active users per month, and hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to use all the app’s capabilities. Currently, the price is $9.99 per month or $69.99 annually.

The next step is for PhotoRoom to provide generative AI to its software, beginning with Stable Diffusion. Because the business has been profitable with its current personnel, it is soliciting money for this reason.

“Up until this point, we just picked an item and removed the background. But after that, customers began searching for a background to reposition the object in front of a template, according to co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif.

PhotoRoom will create a marketing product image based on your object when given a text command. Some users will initially have access to the service in beta. It will gradually be made available to all users.

“Matthieu and Eliot have developed a solution that stands out from the competition by paying close attention to user demands. Online photography is hugely important, and PhotoRoom has the potential and will to dominate the sector, according to Balderton Capital partner Bernard Liautaud.