Presti is addressing the challenges associated with furniture photography

Paris-based startup Presti has secured a $3.5 million seed round led by Partech to streamline lifestyle photography creation using generative AI. Presti's AI technology addresses a significant challenge in creating product pictures in the furniture industry: the costly and time-consuming process of organizing photo shoots for new collections. The standard procedure when organizing a photoshoot involves renting a venue—usually a house—, transporting the furniture, and hiring a crew.

Presti's proposed alternative leverages a modified version of Stable Diffusion XL to transform plain product images into realistic lifestyle photographs. The startup has fine-tuned its AI model using a dataset of over 75,000 high-quality furniture images, enabling it to generate perspectively accurate and visually appealing scenes. Moreover, Presti goes beyond background generation and lets users add accessories to the furniture, like cushions to a sofa. The accessory generations are more realistic than manual picture edits, giving customers a better representation of how the furniture would look in real life.

Presti is also working to emulate the function that lets users test different fabrics and colors for the same piece of furniture, so it looks more natural than when the edits are done using software like Photoshop. Ideally, this feature will simplify new product releases for furniture makers, and could potentially streamline and automate large parts of the lifestyle photograph creation process. Nevertheless, Presti's approach to furniture photography unavoidably raises questions about the future of traditional product photography and the role of human creativity in marketing visuals.

As Presti continues to refine its technology and expand its client base, which includes a partnership with major retailer Maisons du Monde, the startup is poised to reshape how furniture brands approach product visualization in the digital age.