Paris-based AI photo editing app Photoroom has reached another milestone following a successful funding round which raised a total of $43 million. Photoroom has now reached a valuation of $500 million as per CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who co-founded Photoroom with CTO Eliot Andres.
Photoroom has been attracting casual users and business users alike, allowing anyone to visualize their photo ideas within minutes. The latest funding round has been in the works since January and at that time it seemed like it would be valued higher at $50 million, as per TechCrunch.
The latest funding round brings a new investor Aglaé and also brings back existing ones such as Y Combinator, but it was spearheaded by none other than Balderton Capital. Photoroom has not revealed other investors but previous names on the list include Kima Ventures, FJ Labs, Meta, and a number of angels such as Yann LeCun, Zehan Wang (formerly of Magic Pony and Twitter), execs from Hugging Face and Disney+, and many more.
Following the $43 million funding round, Photoroom has now raised a total of $64 million in its lifetime ever since it was launched four years ago.
The new funds will be invested in its R&D and infrastructure and will also be used to hire additional employees. Although this is surprising to hear during a time of mass layoffs within the tech sector, Photoroom currently only has 50 employees and wants to reach 100 by the end of the year.
Despite operating in a highly competitive market with notable players such as Picsart and Pixelcut, Photoroom reports that the AI editing app has reached 150 million downloads and currently processes 5 billion images. Other than the app, Photoroom is also available through an API as well as a web service. Its rival Picsart has recently raised $200 million.
Photoroom, unlike other AI photo editing app rivals, has trained its own models from scratch, meaning it has to invest more into computing power and also has to license content deals from publishers, artists, and more content creators. This is why it is also looking to hire more talent since more technical expertise is needed to run operations for all these models.
