Industry
AI-Powered SaaS / App
Company size
50-80 employees
Established
2019
Value
€43M Series B at €500M
Location
Paris, France
How Photoroom built data foundations that enabled €43M post-series B investor reporting and then hired a CFO and Head of Data who hit the ground running.
Photoroom is an AI-powered creative partner built for commerce serving 20M+ monthly active users globally, processing over 5 billion images annually. With a unique B2B/B2C hybrid model spanning freemium, paid, and teams licences, Photoroom has built one of the fastest-growing photo editing apps while maintaining exceptional capital efficiency.
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Paris, Photoroom raised their Series B at a €500M valuation in 2024, backed by Balderton Capital, Meta Platforms, and Y Combinator. The company has maintained their competitive edge through relentless focus on 1M target ARR-per-employee.
For a hyper-growth app company navigating complex monetisation across consumer and business segments, data is the foundation of every strategic decision. Photoroom needed to:
Without accurate, consolidated revenue reporting, Photoroom was flying blind exactly when precision mattered most.
“While raising our Series B, we didn’t have anywhere where we had the revenue per quarter, per product, nothing. It took going into multiple tools for little insight…”
— Charlotte, Photoroom’s Senior Product Data Analyst
Photoroom’s Series B fundraising exposed a critical gap: zero visibility into revenue by quarter, product, or customer segment. This wasn’t just an inconvenience. It threatened their ability to deliver on investor promises and posed a challenge to attracting top executives.
Specific pain points:
The company had tried to engage Tasman once before, but the business case was not strong enough just yet. What changed? Charlotte joined as a senior product data analyst and made the business case that delivering on Photoroom’s Series B promises was impossible without solving their data problem first.
Given Photoroom’s strict focus on ARR-per-employee and time urgency, they couldn’t justify a 6-12 month hiring process or the budget for a full data team.
The tipping point: Photoroom needed reliable investor-ready reporting immediately — not in six months.
Tasman delivered a complete subscription revenue reporting system in 12 weeks. Photoroom leadership could finally answer investor questions with confidence rather than scrambling through spreadsheets.
After the initial build, Photoroom engaged Tasman for low-velocity maintenance. This phase was, to put it politely, not our finest hour. We discovered what should have been obvious: small maintenance retainers don’t work when requirements keep evolving. Photoroom needed ongoing development capacity, not just the occasional bug fix. Lesson learnt.
Tasman operated as Photoroom’s interim data team, across 4 quarters. The partnership continued until Photoroom hired Juliette as Head of Data—exactly as planned.
“We went from not being able to answer business questions to people in the business teams directly asking their questions in natural language and getting the answer in under 1 minute”
— Juliette, Photoroom’s Head of Data
Post-Series B, Photoroom hired their first CFO. Unlike typical CFO onboarding where the first 6 months are spent building basic financial reporting, Photoroom’s CFO walked into:
When Photoroom hired Juliette as Head of Data, she inherited a production-ready data platform instead of a greenfield projects:
Photoroom’s success means we delivered on our pro-empowerment, no lock-in philosophy.
Fixed-scope sprints provided predictable costs and rapid value delivery without open-ended retainers. Each quarter, Photoroom chose whether to continue — true partnership, not dependency.
Knowledge transfer as default meant Charlotte could manage the platform independently, not wait for consultant availability. When Juliette joined, she had full ownership from day one. Our goal is to make ourselves unnecessary, which is either terrible business strategy or rather good ethics. We’ve chosen to believe the latter.
Well-organised meetings and project management meant zero wasted time or miscommunication across the engagement.
Specialist expertise across analytics, data engineering, and delivery ensured any technical challenge could be solved without piecing together multiple vendors. Photoroom got a full data team’s capabilities without the hiring overhead or the office politics.
Most importantly, Tasman’s goal was to make themselves redundant — building a foundation that enabled Photoroom to hire and empower their own data and finance leaders.
Eighteen months after initial delivery, 100% of Tasman’s infrastructure remains in production — including dbt jobs, observability systems, alerts, and Terraform configurations. This durability demonstrates the quality of the foundational architecture.
With their data infrastructure in place and leadership team expanded, Photoroom continues to scale their data capabilities under Juliette’s direction. The platform Tasman built has evolved to support:
For companies preparing for fundraising, navigating complex business models, or evaluating when to hire senior data and finance leaders, Photoroom’s journey offers a clear playbook. Invest in foundations early, partner for speed, and build towards independence. The right infrastructure doesn’t just solve today’s problems — it enables tomorrow’s leaders.
Is your company preparing for a funding round without clear revenue visibility? Or struggling to attract senior data leadership because infrastructure isn’t in place?
Get in touch to learn how we can build investor-ready data foundations in weeks, not quarters.