France and the US are the two countries which have shaped the career of Matthieu Rouif (known as “Matt”), the co-founder and CEO of Photoroom, one of the most talked-about startups in the European AI firmament in recent times.Born in France, the Y-Combinator and Stanford University alum spent time in the French Air Force (over 100 parachute jumps to his name) before a career which has seen him yo-yo across the Atlantic, by way of teaching jobs, founding startups, or working at US tech firms.Likewise, France and the US are the two markets which have been central to propelling the Photoroom app to 200m-plus downloads and Hollywood recognition: the Paris-headquartered startup has a soon-to-open office in the US (New York), its biggest market, where it plucks talent from while also counting some US heavyweight brands as customers.“I think people are very smart on both sides of the pond,” says Rouif, speaking over video from the US.In a breezy 30-minute video interview, Rouif, who is in his late thirties, discusses Trump tariffs; a typical day in the office; his relationship with his co-founder; European sovereignty and Project Europe; the DE&I backlash; banning direct messaging in the workplace; spending millions of Euros on AI training data; and why he quit skydiving.Photoroom’s raison d'êtreFounded in 2019, Photoroom’s raison d'être is democratising photo editing: it’s an easy-to-use photo editing app which does a good job of matching the quality of a professional photographer minus the lofty expense.Photoroom is primarily known for removing background imagery and creating a white background for e-commerce sellers (its core market), and casual users.It has also expanded its offer to AI tools, so users can swap a rainy Paris background for sunny Bali or remove an unwanted facial pimple while users can also edit photos en masse. It has free offerings and subscription packages, up to $90 a year.Occupying a highly congested market, Photoroom competes against the likes of Adobe, Google, Canva, Piscart and a slew of other AI startups.But Photoroom appears to be motoring along: it processes around five billion images a year, hit €50m in annual recurring revenue in 2023, is profitable, and has recently shifted into the enterprise sector, luring in Amazon and DoorDash as customers.It also won a role in the Barbie film, as Warner Bros leveraged its photo editing API in the film’s social media campaign.Some numbersLast year, Photoroom raised $43m at a $500m valuation, in a round led by Balderton Capital, with Aglaé and previous backer Y Combinator also participating.Other backers include Meta and Meta AI head Yann LeCun and execs from Hugging Face and Disney+. It has raised a total of $64bn.Photoroom didn’t magic itself out of thin air, Aladdin lamp-like, as Rouif had been working in and around photo technology for around 15 years.He got the “itch” to launch another startup while working as a senior product manager at GoPro, which acquired Stupeflix, the previous startup he was working at.He teamed up with co-founder, Eliot Andres, Photoroom's CTO, a former child actor, whose resume includes published tech author and speedy app developer.The pair, Rouif reflects, are “quite complementary” in style.Typical daySo what is a typical day for Rouif? After the school run ( he has three children), Rouif says his days are, effectively, split into two, as he presides over a team of around 80.He says mornings are spent listening to its internal podcast with user interviews, strategy work, and product development, while afternoons are spent in internal and external meetings.He says he enjoys the public-facing part of the job, like speaking to the media. That said, he says he wants to get Andres to do more of it.Attracting talentAmid an insanely competitive machine learning talent market, Rouif says that a pull for potential recruits is the freedom Photoroom offers builders.He says: "Machine learners and engineers come to Photoroom and a few months later they see a model they built from scratch reach 100m people. You are not going to be able to do that at bigger companies.”He also points out that, amid a whirlwind of AI startups cropping up, Photoroom is one of the few which is financially secure.Furthermore, he says Photoroom has a “no direct” Slack message policy (inspired by Stripe’s anyone-can-read-an-email policy), an edict which, he says, gives engineers the chance to jump on any projects they like should they have a lightbulb moment.Training modelsPhotoroom trains its own image AI models, with its training data sourced from publicly available data, images submitted by users, as well as data purchased from professional photographers and photography firms.In total, he says Photoroom has spent millions of Euros on buying and licencing training data.By comparison, OpenAI, behind ChatGPT, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars licencing content from news publishers to train its AI models.Along with ethical concerns about crediting and paying for training data, another big ethical concern with AI is deepfakes and the harm they can cause.Rouif says: “As we train our models from scratch, we control the data. We can use data that is clean, so we know where it comes from

FRENCHWEB 2025, qui sont les entreprises de la tech française qui recrutent le plus ?Les entreprises qui recrutent dans la French Tech en 2025 : plus de 510 000 emplois recensésMalgré un contexte économique au ralenti, les acteurs de la French Tech et des secteurs de l’innovation poursuivent leur dynamique de création d’emplois. En 2024, les entreprises du secteur regroupaient plus de 510 000 emplois, en légère hausse par rapport aux 488 860 recensés fin 2023, selon un panel de plus de 1500 sociétés analysées par notre partenaire WE-INNOVATE.EU. Ce panel inclut startups, PME, ETI et grands groupes, couvrant des secteurs variés comme l’agriculture, le spatial, le quantique, les biotech ou encore l’e-commerce.25 entreprises en tête du recrutementLes entreprises les plus actives cette année incluent Dassault Systèmes, Believe, Ecovadis, Qonto, OVHcloud et Exotec. Ces organisations figurent parmi les leaders grâce à leur capacité à offrir des opportunités diversifiées dans des secteurs comme l’IT, les fintechs, et les greentechs. Les 25 entreprises en tête, listées dans cette édition, recrutent dans des fonctions variées, des métiers techniques aux postes plus traditionnels adaptés aux besoins des entreprises innovantes.Nous n'avons pas pu confirmer votre inscription. Votre inscription est confirmée