When you’ve purchased a sofa online, have you ever considered the backgrounds in the product photos? Furniture brands typically invest heavily in photo shoots when launching new collections. However, this process is both cumbersome and expensive, especially since moving furniture around isn’t straightforward.
To address this challenge, a French startup named Presti, established in November 2022, employs generative AI. They transform a single product image into a lifelike lifestyle photo. Recently, Presti secured a $3.5 million seed round led by global tech investment firm Partech, with additional participation from business angels.
Presti’s co-founder and CEO, Nabil Toumi, explained, “We quickly reached out to 50 potential users. They all echoed the same sentiment: creating product visuals was time-consuming and costly, yet crucial for brand identity and online sales.
Presti turns this:
Into this:
Initially, Presti didn’t specifically target furniture companies. However, the startup soon recognized that these companies faced unique challenges. When organizing photoshoots, they had to rent attractive houses and transport products, resulting in high logistics costs. These shoots were meticulously planned months in advance and incurred expenses amounting to hundreds of thousands or even millions of euros annually1.
Presti’s core technology relies on a customized version of Stable Diffusion XL, specifically fine-tuned for furniture imagery. Initially, the team experimented with a vanilla version of Stable Diffusion XL but encountered issues. For example, generated images would sometimes have distorted proportions, such as extra legs added to a sofa or misaligned perspectives. Ensuring that the wall behind the sofa remained parallel was also challenging1
Presti emphasizes the significance of its training dataset, which comprises over 75,000 ultra-high-quality furniture images. These images are instrumental in reinforcing the learning process for specific use cases, particularly when generating lifelike lifestyle photos from single product images.
Beyond background generation, Presti allows customers to add accessories. For example, when creating product shots for a new sofa, users can include cushions. These cushions cast realistic shadows on the sofa, avoiding the appearance of post-processing additions.
Additionally, Presti aims to enable material swapping for furniture brands. Although this feature is still in progress, it will streamline the process of releasing new products for companies using Presti.
However, freelance photographers may not welcome this innovation. The question remains whether machine-generated backgrounds can fully replace the creativity and originality contributed by skilled humans during physical photoshoots, such as location stylists.
Presti collaborates primarily with mid-sized furniture companies but has also established a strategic partnership with Maisons du Monde, one of France’s largest furniture retailers. Notable investors in the startup include Maxime Brousse, Thibaud Elzière, Julien Hirth, Abou Laraki, and Rémi Lemonnier.