AI-based photo-editing app Photoroom, which is coming out of Paris and growing like a weed in attracting people doing business online and also tons of casual users, confirmed it closed its latest funding round: $43 million at a $500 million valuation, according to CEO and co-founder Matthieu Rouif, who co-founded Photoroom with CTO Eliot Andres.

We were one of the first to report that the round was in the works, back in January. It looked as if it would be over $50 million; in the end, it was a bit lower.

The funding comes at a time when the company continues to see a lot of adoption amid a pretty competitive market, with other players including the likes of Picsart, which has raised nearly $200 million, and Pixelcut. Photoroom said that it's currently processing some 5 billion images annually, with its app passing 150 million downloads (it's also available by way of an API, and via a web interface).

Balderton Capital led the round with new backer Aglaé and previous backer Y Combinator also participating. Other investors are not being disclosed, but previous backers 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. This brings the total capital raised by the company so far to $64 million since its inception four years ago.

Photoroom wishes to use the funds raised into hiring more people and has been investing in R&D and infrastructure. At this point in time, we're still seeing high layoffs all across the tech space and Photoroom stands around 50 employees and is eyeing to double up till the end of this year.

Specifically, not many startups focused on developing their own models from the bottom up to build AI applications-: That is, building one's own models takes some investment in compute power, as well as arrangements to acquire the rights of the images to use them- something the company will want to hire to do so as well-: Increasing its more technical talent further helps the firm continue honing the efficiency and functionality of those models. (Case in point: The company claims that its custom architecture speeds up image generation for users by up to 40% compared to other visual AI platforms.)

The next step is empowering businesses to create amazing product photos without needing to be an expert at prompt engineering or photography, said Rouif in a statement. "Our model has been trained to excel at product photography and can quickly adapt to user needs and feedback."
Besides its homegrown models, the company continues to roll out a number of new features. There coincides with a new product photography creation tool, which is Photoroom Instant Diffusion. It was basically intended to make images so consistent in styling for that single seller regardless of its shoot location and circumstances-a place where all the production seemed to be studio professional; AI-generated backgrounds, the ability to expand scenes to more space than available using scene expansions, AI generated images, and an ocean of image-editing facilities. This way, it can also automatically process all images in their collections if they have very large collections.

We look forward to speaking with Rouif in person and hopefully an investor and we will update this post when and if we can reach them. (They didn't contact us ahead of time!)

"Balderton has seen Photoroom grow from day one, and we remain consistently impressed by their leadership and execution on this user-first vision," said Bernard Liautaud, managing partner at Balderton, in a statement. "The generative capabilities of Photoroom's AI are unmatched, and we're confident they'll continue to drive the charge in this fast-changing world."