French gen AI firm Photoroom has acquired $43 million in Series B funding, increasing its estimated valuation to $500 million.

With assistance from Y Combinator, the round was spearheaded by French venture capital firm Aglaé Ventures and Balderton Capital, totaling $64 million in fundraising for the company.

A photo-editing platform called Photoroom is developed; it has been utilized to promote high-profile events including Taylor Swift’s most recent album release and the Barbie movie.

With this new funding, the business intends to buy more specialized processors for AI training in order to enhance the capabilities of its internal AI model. Additionally, it states that by signing agreements with leading picture producers and photographers, the quality of its dataset will be improved.

To do this, the business plans to double the size of its 50-person team by the end of 2024, which will also necessitate acquiring top talent.

The generative AI model created by the YC graduates can replace and eliminate picture backgrounds. Because they may use the technology to produce studio-quality images for their products, small firms with limited marketing resources have shown a particular interest in this technique.

However, the company’s solution has also drawn interest from well-known companies, like Shopify, Netflix, and Warner Brothers, who have created product photos for their websites by directly integrating Photoroom’s API.

Expanding Quickly

Despite being just four years old, Photoroom has already experienced remarkable growth, and it is one of the few generative AI firms to have achieved substantial traction for a commercial offering.

“We are not only increasing the speed of our model, but also optimising for quality, through higher resolution, more detailed images and a larger training dataset than ever before,” said Photoroom cofounder and CEO Matthieu Rouif.

The business states that the software has been downloaded 150 million times, and that subscriptions are bringing in €50 million in recurring revenue annually, which helps to make the startup viable.

In a report titled “How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?” released by Andreessen Horowitz last September, Photoroom came in at number six. That ranked two places higher than Hugging Face, a New York-based AI business founded by Frenchmen that received $235 million this past summer.

Using Photoroom, which lets people create posters of themselves with the movie’s branding as a backdrop, Warner Brothers utilized it to promote the Barbie movie last summer. Additionally, Taylor Swift’s website now allows fans to customize her album cover with their own faces thanks to the integration of technology.