Phota Labs raised $5.6 million for identity-aware photo edits

By Nathan Brooks

Phota Labs raised a $5.6 million seed round led by a16z last year and is launching a free iOS app that applies AI to everyday photos. The app promises professional-looking results without replacing the people in the original scene.

Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia founded the startup after meeting at Adobe, where they worked on computational photography products including Project Indigo, Lightroom and Photoshop. The founders saw a gap in existing editing tools. Those tools can enhance a photo, Zhang and Xia said, but often cannot rescue a badly captured shot.

What does Phota Labs change for everyday photographers?

The practical change is less manual editing. Phota Labs gives each user a personal AI photo assistant that can improve images before the user requests help, Zhang told TechCrunch. The system can tighten a wide-angle group photo, turn a selfie into a regular-looking shot and preserve the subjects' natural appearance.

“Phota is your personal photo assistant that can make great photos for any moment you want to keep before you even ask, which means that it’s a very proactive experience,” Zhang told TechCrunch.

“Think of it almost like a photographer or virtual photographer who looks over your camera roll and tries to understand what’s happening and how they could have taken that photo for you on the spot for that scene.”

Users choose among photography styles that determine how the AI changes an image. The least dramatic option preserves the original lens and composition. More forceful styles introduce fisheye lenses, alternative angles or entirely different perspectives.

Zhang said general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT often alter a person's appearance, especially when the source photo is blurry, because they do not know what that person actually looks like. Phota Labs built its own personalization technology for that problem. The system learns a person's identity and tries to preserve that identity through any transformation, Zhang said.

Xia framed the goal as authenticity rather than artificial perfection. He said the company invests research into understanding personal context and building its identity model so edited images remain recognizable as the same real moment.

“We have this obsession with authenticity,” Xia said. “I think there’s so much value in connecting AI with real moments and making sure those photos are not perfect, in a sense.”

Phota Labs stamps edited images with invisible watermarks that identify them as AI-altered when shared on social platforms. The disclosure travels with an edit even when the software aims to reconstruct the original scene rather than visibly transform it.

The startup initially targets people who take many photos, post them on social media and dislike tedious editing. Zhang said the aim is to turn unusable images into pictures people want to print. She said the company wants those photos to become meaningful keepsakes people can remember.

The founders eventually expect broader demand from retirees creating keepsakes for grandchildren and parents building polished family albums for relatives. They also want to give people who love photography but never adopted editing a route to professional-quality results.

Xia said beta users treated enhanced versions of moments they had lived as real memories rather than AI-generated images. He also found that users took more photos because they knew Phota Labs could improve them later.

Phota Labs will start with a free app to build an initial user base. The company will then explore a freemium model and plans an Android app in the future.

For users, the test is whether automatic edits can become routine without sacrificing recognizable faces. For Phota Labs, the next commercial tests are repeat usage after launch, conversion to paid features and execution of its promised Android release.