Phota Labs Announces Sign-Up of Beta App and Secures $5.6 Million in Seed Funding

Phota Labs, a research and product company building personalized visual GenAI led by Cecilia Zhang, Zach Xia, and others, has announced $5.6 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with support from Figma Venture, AGI House, and creative individuals Guillermo Rauch, Sabrina Hahn, Jon Barron, and Sylvia Wang.

Most visual GenAI models aim for scale and generic output, but the most valuable ones will be personal, grounded in real lives. World models can generate perfect scenes, yet they miss the details that matter—unique faces, meaningful settings, and lived moments. What resonates are not synthetic fantasies, but authentic memories.

Personalized visual GenAI solves this by focusing on two pillars: identity and context. Identity reflects who someone is, while context captures real-life settings, relationships, and events. By learning from personal photos and videos, models can preserve the who, where, and when, while refining the how. The result is image generation that feels authentic, meaningful, and truly personal.

This foundation makes generative models personal, able to recognize who someone is and the context that defines their memories. The beta app, now open for signup, brings this power directly to users, generating images that are faithful to real people and moments, where “almost” is never enough. An API is also available for developers and partners to embed the same fidelity into their own products and workflows, ensuring images consistently reflect the right people and places. Built on this technical base, entirely new ways of communicating, sharing, and remembering become possible. For partnerships or commercial inquiries, contact info@photalabs.com.

The team behind this effort brings deep expertise across AI, computational photography, and consumer creative products. Members have shipped AI-driven features in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, contributed to Project Indigo, dubbed by some as “the best iPhone camera”, and published early research on personalized generative AI in photography. With experience scaling platforms like Pinterest, the team combines technical innovation with a strong understanding of how to empower creativity and deliver compelling visual experiences.