Technology

Presti uses GenAI to replace expensive photo shoots in the furniture industry

Published

4 months ago

July 16, 2024

IAM

If you’ve ever bought a settee online, have you ever ever considered the houses you see in the background of product photos? When it comes time to launch a brand new collection, furniture brands typically spend a small fortune on photo shoots. It’s a tedious and expensive process, since it’s hard to move furniture around.

That’s why a French startup called PriestFounded in November 2022, uses generative AI to transform a single product image into a practical lifestyle photo. The company just raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by global investment firm Partech, which also includes several angel investors.

“We picked up the phone really quickly and talked to 50 potential users,” Presti co-founder and CEO Nabil Toumi told TechCrunch. “And they all said the same thing. Creating product visuals was a very long process, it cost a lot of money, and they didn’t have a simple solution for creating those images. At the same time, it was really the most important asset for brands to create a unique identity and sell online.”

Presti puts it this manner:

Image sources: Priest

Involved in this:

Initially, Presti didn’t limit its focus to furniture corporations. However, the startup quickly realized that furniture corporations face some particularly difficult problems.

“They had to rent a nice house for the photo shoot, they had to transport the products — so they had high logistics costs. And these photo shoots were planned months in advance and ended up costing them hundreds of thousands, even millions of euros a year,” Toumi said.

At its core, Presti uses Stable Diffusion XL as its base model. It has been trained and modified to perform particularly well for product images in the furniture industry.

At first, the team tried using the regular Stable Diffusion XL. But they quickly realized there have been some issues. “The sofa would have legs added to it, and the back would be distorted,” Toumi said. Similarly, getting the perspective right was difficult. For example, the wall behind the sofa had to be parallel to the sofa.

“At the same time, something that’s really important is the dataset that we trained our model on. We currently have over 75,000 images of ultra-high-quality furniture images in our industry that we can use to train our model to strengthen the learning process for the specific use case, for these types of images,” Toumi said.

Presti didn’t want to stop at generating backgrounds. Customers also can add accessories. For example, if you happen to’re generating product photos for a brand new sofa, you may add pillows. These pillows will forged realistic shadows on the sofa, so that they won’t seem like something added in Photoshop.

Similarly, furniture brands typically have several variations of the same model with different textures and colours. While it’s still a piece in progress, Presti hopes its customers will give you the chance to swap materials using its tool. As a result, it should be much easier for corporations using Presti to release latest products.

On the other hand, freelance photographers won’t like the latest product. And whether the creativity and originality of other expert individuals who might work on a physical shoot, akin to on-location stylists, will be completely replaced by machine-generated backdrops—without the resulting artificial lifestyle images looking a bit the same—is an open query.

Although Presti works mainly with mid-sized furniture corporations, it also has a strategic partnership with Maisons du Monde, one in all the largest furniture retailers in France. In addition to Partech, other investors in the startup include Maxime Brousse, Thibaud Elzière, Julien Hirth, Abou Laraki and Rémi Lemonnier.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

Waymo’s latest round of financing raises its valuation to $45 billion

Published

7 hours ago

November 5, 2024

IAM

Waymo One robotaxi sky harbor terminal phoenix curbside pickup

Waymo recently Closed a $5.6 billion Series C financing round led by parent company Alphabet, joined by a who’s who of Silicon Valley enterprise capital firms. The investment brings Waymo’s overall valuation to over $45 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

Alphabet previously announced in July that it could donate one other $5 billion to Waymo, but didn’t provide details, saying only that it was a “multi-year” commitment. Andreesen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Fidelity, Tiger Global, Perry Creek and T. Rowe Price joined the round. Waymo declined to say how much each had invested.

This is Waymo’s second round of external fundraising and first since its $2.25 billion Series B in 2020, which eventually grew to $3.2 billion. The autonomous vehicle maker says it is going to use the funds to expand into latest cities and further develop its autonomous capabilities for “business applications.”

Waymo is a totally different company now in some respects than when it raised within the last round. At that point, the corporate was still pushing towards autonomous trucking, which it had abandoned.

Instead, the corporate focused almost entirely on robot transport services. The bet paid off. Waymo currently provides industrial robotaxi services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and is expanding to Austin and Atlanta. It provides paid rides to greater than 100,000 customers every week in its first three markets and offers rides to and from the Phoenix airport. Operates on highways within the Phoenix and San Francisco areas.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

India Posts Notice to Wikipedia Over Bias Concerns

Published

14 hours ago

November 5, 2024

IAM

Wikipedia is facing increasing regulatory pressure in India as local authorities query whether the platform should proceed to enjoy legal protection as a neutral intermediary reasonably than being classified as a publisher.

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice to Wikipedia on Tuesday questioning the indirect status of the encyclopedia offered to technology platforms in India. The ministry cited concerns about concentrated editorial control and chronic complaints about bias and inaccuracies on the platform.

The notice follows a controversial case before the Delhi High Court, where judges described Wikipedia’s open editing feature as “dangerous” and threatened to suspend its operations in India. The court is hearing a defamation case filed by news agency Asian News International that seeks to discover Wikipedia authors who allegedly characterised the news agency as a “propaganda tool” of the Indian government.

Justice Navin Chawla rejected Wikipedia’s request for added time to respond due to Wikipedia’s lack of physical presence in India, warning of contempt proceedings against the platform if it fails to comply with the order to disclose user information. “If you don’t want to comply with Indian laws, don’t do business in India,” the judge said.

Wikipedia maintains that its volunteer editors must follow established rules on verifiable content and legal guidelines, though this defense is facing increasing scrutiny from Indian authorities concerned concerning the platform’s content moderation practices.

Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama and a outstanding voice on technology policy, questioned the legal basis for the federal government’s move, arguing that Indian IT law determines a platform’s status based on features reasonably than the variety of editors.

“You can be a platform with one user/editor or a billion,” he wrote on X.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

Coatue raises $1 billion for AI betting

Published

21 hours ago

November 5, 2024

IAM

Coatue Management, a hedge fund that has invested heavily in tech startups throughout the pandemic boom, is raising $1 billion to support artificial intelligence corporations, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The funds that can contribute to the corporate’s flagship fund will probably be obtained primarily from institutional investors. However, the report shows that wealthy individuals with accounts at brokerage Raymond James and Associates can even spend money on Coatue.

Coatue, which manages nearly $50 billion in assets, invested in greater than 170 VC-backed corporations in 2021, based on PitchBook data. Since then, Coatue has dramatically slowed its pace of investing in startups, supporting only 81 corporations in 2022 and around 30 corporations in 2023.

However, the cross-border investor shouldn’t be done investing in private corporations. According to PitchBook data, in 2024 Coatue supported 29 startups. The company’s latest AI-focused investments include Glean, Scale AI and Skild AI, which is constructing a general-purpose AI robot. Philippe Laffont, founding father of Coatue (pictured above), said they’re particularly enthusiastic about humanoid robots with artificial intelligence-powered brains.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com