Lifeboat Foundation

Photoroom announced Tuesday that it has raised $43 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $500 million. London-based early-stage venture firm Balderton Capital and Aglaé Ventures, an investment firm backed by LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault and his family, led the round, with participation from Y Combinator. The new round brings the Photoroom’s total funding to $64 million. With more than 150 million app downloads and a subscription-based business model, the Paris-based startup has crossed $50 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Rouif.

Photoroom has also garnered the attention of brands like Netflix, Lionsgate and Warner Bros, who have used the startup’s API to promote films and shows including Barbie and Black Mirror. In October 2023, Photoroom partnered with Universal Music Group-owned record label, Republic Records, to create a custom selfie generator of Taylor Swift’s album 1989 that millions of fans used to create an album cover with their own faces.

Photoroom first gained traction in 2020, the same year it was accepted into Y Combinator. During the pandemic, entrepreneurs rushed to produce online catalogs of their products and without access to photographers and professional photo studios, they turned to photo editing tools like Photoroom. Before generative AI tools became mainstream, the startup’s most popular tools were a background remover tool, a tool called “magic retouch,” which removed unwanted objects from a photo as well as a feature that could blur backgrounds in two seconds. When more advanced AI tools became available in 2023, the startup expanded its offerings to include fully AI-generated backgrounds, where users could create background visuals from scratch through text prompts — now Photoroom’s most commonly used feature.

It’s the problem that everyone with a passing knowledge of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) worries about: how to stop the technology going rogue and delivering bogus results.

Enkrypt AI has developed a software solution that sits between large language models and users, aiming to detect bad behaviours from either side.

The soft and flexible wearable sticker sensor can be worn for long hours and even picks slight movements that conventional sensors miss.

The move also comes when Apple faces stiff competition from other tech giants in the electric vehicle space, such as Xiaomi and Sony.

Apple has reportedly finally given up on its long-running and secretive electric car project.

The project was dubbed Project Titan. According to a report by Bloomberg, the tech giant reportedly broke the news to its employees on Tuesday. The report said that many of the 2,000-strong car team will be reassigned to other areas, such as generative AI.

Continue reading “Apple pulls the plug on its electric car project” »

Discover Genie, the magical AI wizard from Google DeepMind, trained on internet videos to create endless action-packed virtual worlds.

On a normal day in February, Tim Rocktäschel from Google DeepMind’s Open-Endedness Team unveiled an exciting development in the field of artificial intelligence.

The Microsoft-Mistral agreement draws the scrutiny of the European Commission.

Microsoft has inked a multi-year partnership with French startup Mistral AI to make its artificial intelligence (AI) models, like ‘Le Chat,’ available through the Azure cloud computing platform.

Essentially, Microsoft’s investment will be used to purchase equity in Mistral. The valuation of Mistral AI remains the same even after Microsoft’s investment.

Continue reading “Mistral AI: Microsoft invests $16M in OpenAI French doppelgänger” »

This little fish emits noises as loud as a gunshot, topping 140 decibels.

One of the world’s smallest fish lives in Myanmar’s streams, and experts have been surprised by its high sound.

Samsung doubles down in HBM race with largest memory.

Samsung has unveiled a new memory chip, which it claims is the ‘highest-capacity to date’ for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Discover the groundbreaking capabilities of Xiaomi’s CyberDog 2, a bio-inspired quadruped robot leaping forward in robotics!