PhotoRoom

PhotoRoom is a French company that provides photo editing software via an AI-powered photo editor. The company aims to enable companies of all sizes to create studio-quality images specific to their brand, quickly and affordably. Photoroom leverages deep learning to translate pixels into objects, simplifying non-creative tasks such as removing backgrounds and items in the image. PhotoRoom offers a range of free tools and is used by millions of users on its Android, iOS, and web apps.

The techstack PhotoRoom uses to build its product includes Python, PyTorch, TRTorch, TensorFlow, C, WebAssembly, Kotlin, Swift, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, Next.js, Google Cloud, Vercel, and Figma. PhotoRoom's headquarters are in Paris, and the company hires remotely in Europe. They encourage employees to visit the Paris office at least once a month, and every three months, the company organizes an off-site meeting for its workforce.

PhotoRoom was founded in 2019 by Matthieu Rouif and Eliot Andres. Rouif previously worked for the video editing app RePlay, which was acquired by GoPro in 2016 and renamed Quik. After working on image-editing products at GoPro, Rouif left the company and began working on PhotoRoom. He stated that the reason for starting PhotoRoom came from his experience editing a large number of images in his previous job:

I had to edit a large number of images and cut out the backgrounds. I wasn’t so good at using the editing tool so it took a lot of time and I felt it was such a waste to spend so long doing such simple work. The apps that were available at that time to cut out backgrounds all involved manually removing them. I thought, ‘if only there was an app that could do this automatically.'

The founding partners attended an Apple training program held at the start-up campus Station F when they were in the process of making the app. They received pre-seed funding from Adjacent and $125 thousand in seed funding from Y Combinator after participating in its Summer 2020 class. The company raised $19 million in series A funding in November 2022, led by Balderton Capital with participation from angel investors at Facebook, Hugging Face, and Disney+. Existing investor Adjacent is also invested again in the company.