A fresh iOS app named Phota Labs offers users a personal AI photo assistant capable of transforming ordinary snapshots into images that appear as though a professional photographer captured them—while still maintaining the authenticity of the original picture. Instead of delivering yet another photo-editing tool, Phota Labs seeks to harness AI advancements to automate editing, making it simpler for anyone to obtain better photos. The a16z-backed startup was founded by Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia, who crossed paths at Adobe while developing computational photography products such as Project Indigo, Lightroom, and Photoshop. The pair identified a gap in available editing tools and came to believe that while editing software can be powerful for enhancing photos, it isn't very effective at fixing an image that wasn't captured well to begin with. Phota Labs addresses this by concentrating on correcting the shot itself while preserving the natural appearance of the people in the image. "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."

The concept is to leverage AI to transform photos—whether converting a wide-angle group shot into a tighter portrait or turning a selfie into a standard photograph. Users can select from various photography styles that dictate how the AI transforms their images, spanning from subtle adjustments that retain the original lens and composition to more dramatic transformations that add effects like fisheye lenses, alternative angles, and entirely different perspectives. Although some individuals turn to ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to enhance or edit images, these tools frequently alter a person's appearance—particularly with blurry photos—because they don't know what that person actually looks like. "For Phota, we built our own tech," Zhang said. "We built this personalization technology that actually learns about people's identity and is able to preserve them in any transformation we do to a photo."

Images edited with Phota Labs carry invisible watermarks that identify them as AI-altered when shared on social platforms. The startup initially targets people who take large quantities of photos and enjoy sharing them on social media, but don't want to contend with the tedious process of editing photos. Over time, the founders envision a wider audience—from retirees looking to create beautiful photos for their grandchildren to parents who want to share polished family albums with friends and relatives.

"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. That's why we spend a lot of research into understanding personal context, into building this identity model because we want to make sure the photos are authentic. They're just better photos of the same moment, rather than saying, 'Oh, this is an AI image'."

Xia noted that beta users were thrilled to see improved versions of moments they had genuinely experienced and viewed the results as photos of real memories rather than AI-generated images. The founders discovered that users were taking more photos because they knew Phota Labs could enhance them afterward. "We're turning something that's unusable into something that people want to print," Zhang said. "People who just love photos but never really got into editing can now experience professional quality that could never have been possible. So, I think that meant so much to us. There's so many cherished moments for photos, and we really want them to be actually meaningful and something that you can remember."

On the funding front, the company raised a $5.6 million seed round led by a16z last year. Phota Labs is launching as a free app to build an initial user base before exploring a freemium model. The startup also intends to launch an Android app in the future.