The AI industry has become obsessed with generating images, videos and text. But one London scaleup is tackling a different challenge: making sense of the enormous personal archives we've already created.
I’ll be honest, usually the closest I get to curating my photos is deciding which cat photos to delete from my Google pics to avoid having to pay for storage. And I’m not alone.
According to research by the startup Popsa, people now take an average of 551 photos per month — more than 6,600 per year. Yet 70 per cent of photos are buried and never revisited.
It's an issue Popsa co-founder and CEO Liam Houghton experienced firsthand. He had more than 200,000 photos in his personal library due in part to digitising his childhood archive, including old computer files and printed photographs, and adding locations and timestamps wherever possible.
“I've effectively created a complete photographic record of my life from birth until today. Increasingly, younger generations will have that automatically.
That makes photo organisation an even bigger opportunity over the coming years.”
This created the inspiration for Popsa. People document their entire lives through their smartphones — not just birthdays and holidays, but everyday moments, receipts, screenshots and everything in between. It creates clutter
Popsa uses AI to help people turn photos on their smartphones into personalised printed products. Its platform analyses the people, places, activities and relationships in your photos to organise, remove duplicates and create a curated version of your life story.
Today, the app generates around 89,000 smart albums, demonstrating the scale at which these AI systems are already helping people organise their memories.
“We’re not a printing company; we’re a memory curation platform”
Automation has always been central to Popsa. From day one, its goal wasn't to build another photo editing app, it was to remove as much manual effort as possible from organising and preserving memories. One important decision the company made was to move the AI onto the user's device.
“Unlike cloud-based services that upload and process your photos remotely, our models analyse everything locally. In most cases, we never see your photos unless you decide to print them,” explained Houghton.
Behind the scenes, hundreds of AI models work together to understand what's happening in each image. For example, one model scores photographs for composition, lighting and visual quality. Others identify activities, recognise the people who appear most often in your life, and distinguish them from those who simply happen to be in the background. Taken together, those models allow the system to understand what is likely to be meaningful rather than simply recognising objects within a picture.
The company is now moving beyond curation into AI-generated storytelling by developing technology that can automatically create narratives from your photos. The AI converts images into rich descriptive tokens that capture not only what's visible but also relationships among people, locations, activities, and emotions.
Houghton explains that, in doing so, AI creates a digital version of writing on the back of a digital photo. Instead of simply recognising "a person standing near a structure", the system understands that you're standing in front of the Eiffel Tower during a holiday in Paris with your family. It can then combine those moments into a coherent story.
12 million captions were generated in the last year, based on analysis of photo data.
Scaling with AI, not headcount
Today, Popsa operates in over 50 countries. It generated $58 million in revenue last year and expects to reach between $70 million and $80 million this year. America is now one of the company’s fastest-growing markets and is on course to become its largest.
The company stands out for its comparatively low headcount despite its growth. Today, it generates around $1.2 million in revenue per employee, putting it alongside some of the world's most efficient technology companies.
“A large part of that comes down to AI,” shared Houghton.
“Because we've spent years developing AI for our customers, it was natural to use those same technologies internally. AI now supports operations across virtually every part of the business, allowing our teams to achieve far more without simply working longer hours.”
Creating at Global Scale with AI
According to Popsa’s research, 77 per cent of Europeans have made no plans for what happens to their digital photo libraries after they die. Digital memories don’t get passed down through families like traditional photo albums, but Houghton sees a trend of people printing chapters of their lives — annual photo books that build into a lasting personal archive.
"That's why we deliberately focus on memory preservation rather than becoming a general photo-printing company. We don't want to print mugs or keyrings.
Our goal is to help people tell the story of their lives in a way that can be shared across generations.”
Internationalisation has been part of Popsa's DNA from the beginning. Rather than building for one market and localising later, it designed the platform to support multiple countries from day one, including languages, currencies, local holidays, and date formats.
Houghton contends:
“It sounds like a small detail, but those things matter when you're creating something as personal as a family photo book or calendar. Because localisation was built into the platform from the start, launching in new markets has become much more efficient. The underlying problem we're solving is universal.”
Further, the company creates all of its advertising in-house, and this year will create around 30,000 different video adverts across its international markets.
“AI helps us generate different personas, localise languages through AI dubbing and adapt creative assets much more efficiently than traditional production methods.”
Profits before publicity
Popsa has remained relatively under the radar despite its scale, which Houghton views as somewhat intentional, explaining:
“The technology we've built is incredibly complex. There isn't a single AI model driving Popsa — it's hundreds of different systems working together. We didn't want to reveal too much before those pieces were fully developed.
Building this kind of platform also takes time because you first have to create the training data. In the early years, users made many of those decisions manually, which helped us understand what good curation looks like. Those hundreds of thousands of decisions became the foundation for our automation.”
This approach has also allowed Popsa to focus on building the business. Its international growth generated the revenue needed to fund increasingly sophisticated R&D without relying heavily on external investment.
“Because we've been able to grow without needing additional capital, we've chosen that path. We may raise funding again in the future, but it's valuable to have the flexibility to decide when — and whether — to do so. In today's environment, optionality is incredibly important,” explained Houghton.
Popsa has been EBITDA-profitable since 2022, but has continued to increase its annual R&D investment.
Preserving reality in the age of AI
I was curious how Popsa was thinking about AI-generated images, which may in the future become part of people’s curated lives.
Houghton predicts that while there will be an explosion of AI-generated content over the next few years, the material Popsa works with is fundamentally different.
“Ironically, I think the more synthetic content fills the internet, the more valuable genuine photographs become. People will increasingly want trusted records of real experiences, whether that's family events, holidays or everyday life. Customers can already upload AI-generated images if they want to, and we wouldn't stop them.
But I don't think our role is to become another image-generation platform. Our value lies in helping people preserve and tell the stories behind their real memories.”
Rather than competing to create ever more synthetic images, Popsa is betting that the next frontier for AI lies in helping people reconnect with their existing memories. As our camera rolls continue to expand by thousands of photos every year, the challenge is no longer capturing life's moments, it's making sense of them.
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