Superpose, an AI pose-coaching app by ex-TikTok staff, raises $2.2M

Companies have been increasingly using AI’s image generation chops to teach people photography skills. Google last year released a feature called Camera Coach on Pixel phones to guide users about framing and composition, and in July, Adobe released a new feature in its experimental camera app to use AI to critique photos and suggest changes for capture.

On the same slant, two former TikTok employees, Melody Chu and Jing Liu, are launching a new iOS app called Superpose that uses an AI guide to teach people how to pose for pictures.

Superpose essentially is a camera app. Users can take a selfie or photo of a friend, and the app will generate four potential poses using AI. Some of the poses are extravagant, and at times, the generation seems uncanny.

Users can save generated poses, or use the match pose feature to try to place themselves in the frame based on its suggestions.

Prior to founding Superpose, Chu worked in various product roles in companies like Meta, Nextdoor, Roblox, TikTok, and Slack. Meanwhile, Liu was a founding engineer at a 3D face-scanning startup, and later worked on image and video models at TikTok.

Chu said that the idea for the app stemmed from a personal problem: her husband wasn’t able to take good photos of her.

“My husband just takes awful photos of me. It was a true pain point in our marriage where I don’t understand how he gets me to look just so terrible all the time. And I thought to myself, there has to be a way to solve this problem with advancements in computer vision and generative AI. And I decided to set out on my own,” Chu told TechCrunch.

Superpose was launched in July, and has been downloaded over 22,000 times so far. The company says its users have generated more than 190,000 poses. The app gives users five generations for free every day, but they can buy a pack of five additional generations for $2.99, or 20 generations for $9.99.

While Chu acknowledged that other companies are also entering the AI-guided photography space, she said Superpose wants to focus on becoming the best camera to take portrait photos by following directions from AI. The startup doesn’t want to get into creating AI backgrounds and images, and wants to focus on real-life photographs, she added.

“We want to lean into the core of memory capture versus, say, putting you in a fantastical place that you’ve never been. I think there are so many apps that do that well already, but we really wanna focus on actually capturing the lived moment and experience,” Chu said.

She also acknowledged that some of the pose suggestions might seem uncanny, and the company is working on improving that. The startup says it is working on improving its generation styles, personalization, and ways to better coach users directly from the viewfinder.

Superpose has raised $2.2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Chinese smartphone and selfie app maker Meitu, and OVTR Ventures.