A new iOS app called Phota Labs gives users access to a personal AI photo assistant that transforms everyday snapshots into images that look like they were taken by a professional photographer, while maintaining image authenticity.
Rather than providing consumers with another photo editing tool, Phota Labs aims to leverage advances in AI to automate the editing process and make great photos more easily accessible to everyone.
The a16z-backed startup was founded by Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia, who met at Adobe while working on computational photography products such as Project Indigo, Lightroom, and Photoshop.
They realized that there was a gap in the editing tools on the market, and while they were powerful for improving photos, they were less effective at fixing photos that weren’t taken well in the first place. Phota Labs has changed this by focusing on modifying the shot itself while maintaining a natural look within the image.
“Photota is your personal photo assistant that turns the moments you want to save into great photos before you even ask. So it’s a very active experience,” Zhang told TechCrunch in an interview. “Think of it like a photographer or a virtual photographer who goes through your camera roll and tries to understand what’s going on and how they were able to capture that photo for you right there in that scene.”
The idea is to use AI to transform photos, whether it’s turning a wide-angle group photo into a tighter portrait or a selfie into a regular shot.
Users can choose from a variety of photo styles that determine how the AI transforms images, from subtle edits that preserve the original lens and composition, to more dramatic transformations that introduce effects such as fisheye lenses, different angles, and completely different perspectives.
Some people use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to enhance and edit images, but these tools often end up changing a person’s appearance because they don’t know what the person actually looks like, especially when dealing with blurry photos.
“For Phota, we built our own technology,” says Zhang. “We built this personalization technology that actually learns people’s identities and can preserve that identity no matter what transformations you make to the photo.”
Images edited with Phota Labs feature an invisible watermark that identifies them as having been modified by AI when shared on social platforms.
The startup is initially targeting people who like taking tons of photos and sharing them on social media, but don’t want to get involved in the tedious process of editing them. Over time, the founders envision a wider audience, from retirees who want to create beautiful photos for their grandchildren to parents who want to share sophisticated family albums with friends and relatives.
“We’re all about authenticity,” Shea said. “I think there’s a lot of value in connecting AI to real moments and making sure that in some ways those photos aren’t perfect. That’s why we want to make sure the photos are real, so we understand the personal context and put a lot of research into building this identity model. They’re not, ‘Oh, this is an AI image,’ they’re just better photos of the same moment.”
Xia said beta users were excited to see a better version of the moments they actually lived, and the results were seen as photos of real memories rather than AI-generated images. The founders realized that Phota Labs users were taking more photos because they knew they could enhance them later.
“We’re taking something that can’t be used and turning it into something that people want to print,” Chan said. “Even people who just love photography and don’t really care about editing can now experience a professional quality that wasn’t possible before. So I think this was very meaningful to us. There are so many important moments in photography, and we really want them to be meaningful and memorable.”
On the funding front, the company raised $5.6 million in a seed round led by A16Z last year.
Phota Labs will be released as a free app to build an initial user base before considering a freemium model. The startup also plans to release an Android app in the future.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
