At Phota Labs, we build visual GenAI grounded in your reality. By this we mean being faithful to your lived experience: true to who you are, where you were, and what you saw. If this sounds like a photo, that’s exactly right. We build personal visual models from your own images so that its creation reflects your reality, but made more magical. We’re building GenAI you can use like a camera, to document small and big moments and relive them through the images and videos you create.
GenAI made personal
While most foundational models compete to grow larger and more generic, we’re taking a different bet: the most valuable visual GenAI won’t be generic, no matter how large or powerful. It will be grounded in your reality and therefore personal. World models know the world and can produce perfect scenes, but they miss you and the real moments you experienced. These generic models do not know the unique appearance of you and your loved ones, or the specific makeup and outfit you chose for a special occasion. We believe the time is now to bridge this gap and make the GenAI capability of generating compelling images truly meaningful. The images that resonate with us are not perfect hallucinations, but the everyday moments we genuinely experience.
This is not easy: models that look convincing on celebrities or strangers often fail on you, because you know the who, where, and when of your life, so even small inconsistencies feel instantly wrong. Our solution is personalized visual GenAI, built upon two pillars: identity and context. Identity is who you are and what you value. Context is what’s happening in your life: where you are, the people you're with, the blue sky and glaring sun on that particular day. By learning from your own photos and videos, your model understands how you look in different settings and reasons about the people, places, and objects that matter. We preserve the who, where, and when, and tastefully improve the how — never fabricating people into moments they didn’t live. The result is personal models that are yours to own and use.
The products ahead
This foundation underpins everything we do. When a generative model can be customized to understand you, it unlocks a new kind of creative power. Today, we are opening the signup for our beta app that puts it into people’s hands – creating images that are faithful to who is in the frame and what brings the memory back. When it comes to a photo, there’s no such thing as “almost”. A portrait is either the person you know, or it isn’t. A moment is either the one you remember, or it isn’t.
We are also opening the signup for our API so developers and partners can bring the power of GenAI with the same faithfulness into their own products and workflows, wherever images must reflect consistent people and places. From here, this technical foundation will enable entirely new ways for people to communicate, share, and remember. For commercial inquiries or partnership opportunities, reach out at info@photalabs.com.
Who we are
We’re a team of engineers, researchers, and designers brought together by a shared mission: to connect people more deeply with their memories through photos and videos. We’ve spent years building the foundational pieces that make this possible. We shipped AI-driven features in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, helped build Project Indigo (described by some as “the best iPhone camera”) by leveraging decades of expertise in computational photography, and published early research on personalized generative AI in photography. We’ve also shipped consumer creative products at scale like Pinterest, so we know deeply how to empower users’ creativity and deliver a compelling visual experience.
To fulfill our mission, we are excited to announce that we have raised $5.6M in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. We are also grateful for the invaluable support from Figma Venture, AGI House, and creative individuals Guillermo Rauch, Sabrina Hahn, Jon Barron and Sylvia Wang. The journey begins here.
Come build with us
We see a future where personal visual models are as natural and ever-present as your camera — whether it’s in your pocket, on your glasses, clipped to your clothes, or mounted on a tripod — ready to capture life’s moments and bring them back more vivid, more intimate, more alive. If this mission excites you, join us and let’s build together.
Stay updated with the latest from us on LinkedIn and X.
Photo of the day
A photo of the Polaroid we took on our video filming day, and its re-generated version made with the technology we built. Both are now part of our memory, each with a different tone and feel.
