Popsa’s AI Tames Camera Rolls While Inheritance Plans Lag Behind

Liam Houghton has scanned, dated and organized more than 200,000 photographs charting his own life from birth to today. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Popsa, a London startup whose artificial intelligence sorts, declutters and prints the photo libraries piling up on phones around the world.

Popsa’s own research found that people now take an average of 551 photos a month, more than 6,600 a year, yet 70% of them are never looked at again. Houghton built a business on closing that gap. What he has not solved, and what almost nobody plans for, is what happens to any of it once the person who took it is gone.

The 13.6 Trillion Photo Problem

“I’ve effectively created a complete photographic record of my life from birth until today,” Houghton said. “Increasingly, younger generations will have that automatically. That makes photo organisation an even bigger opportunity over the coming years.”

His own archive, built from digitized computer files and printed photographs from before smartphones existed, is a preview of where everyone else is heading. Independent tracking of the photography market shows just how fast that pile is growing.

• 13.6 trillion is the running tally of digital photos saved worldwide, part of a count approaching 13.6 trillion images this year.
• 2.1 trillion photos were forecast for 2025 alone, the first year the annual total was expected to surpass two trillion images worldwide.
• 650,000 is the lifetime photo count one industry poll projects for today’s average smartphone user across a 65-year span.
• 8 million-plus users have already signed up with Popsa itself, which now ships printed products to more than 50 countries.

Houghton’s own archive is a rounding error against those totals, but Popsa exists because almost none of those trillions of images get organized on their own.

Hundreds of AI Models, Running on Your Phone

Popsa’s AI runs on the user’s own device rather than in the cloud. “Unlike cloud-based services that upload and process your photos remotely, our models analyse everything locally,” Houghton explained. “In most cases, we never see your photos unless you decide to print them.”

That single design choice hides a lot of engineering. Houghton says hundreds of separate AI models work together behind the scenes to read what is actually happening in each picture.

• One model scores every photo for composition, lighting and visual quality.
• Others identify the activity in the frame, from a birthday to a hike.
• Separate models learn to recognize the people who show up most often in someone’s life, and tell them apart from strangers caught in the background.
• Newer models convert images into descriptive tokens capturing relationships, locations, activities and emotions, the raw material behind Popsa’s new storytelling feature.

That last layer is recent. Popsa generated 12 million of those captions in the past year alone, and the app now produces around 89,000 curated smart albums, a rough measure of how many separate life stories its AI is stitching together at any given moment.

We’re not a printing company; we’re a memory curation platform.

Houghton said that in drawing a line between Popsa and the photo-book competitors it often gets grouped with.

What Happens to Your Photos After You Die?

Not much, unless you plan ahead. Every major platform treats a deceased user’s photos as private by default, and a death certificate or court order is no guarantee of access. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft each handle it differently, and most require the account holder to set something up while still alive and logged in.

Google’s own tool lets a user share account data with trusted contacts after a chosen stretch of inactivity, but it is switched off by default and most people never turn it on. Families who skip that step have to submit a death certificate for account access, and Google’s own guidance warns that any decision is made only after careful review, with no promise of a result.

Europe’s Missing Plan for a Digital Inheritance

Popsa’s own research found that 77% of Europeans have made no plans for what happens to their digital photo libraries after they die. The same gap shows up outside Europe too.

A survey by estate-planning firm Epilogue Wills and Your Digital Undertaker, covering more than 1,200 Canadians, found that almost 70% of social media users had no idea pre-planning tools even exist, and that only a quarter of those who did know had ever used them.

Digital memories, Houghton notes, do not pass down through families the way a shoebox of prints once did. That is the problem Popsa is trying to solve on the output side, even if it cannot fix what the platforms do with the originals.

Printed Chapters as an Insurance Policy

Houghton’s answer is physical. He sees a growing habit of people printing annual chapters of their lives, photo books that build year over year into something closer to a family archive than a coffee-table object.

“That’s why we deliberately focus on memory preservation rather than becoming a general photo-printing company,” Houghton said. “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.”

Internationalization was built into Popsa from day one rather than added later, covering languages, currencies, local holidays and date formats across the more than 50 countries it now ships to. “It sounds like a small detail, but those things matter when you’re creating something as personal as a family photo book or calendar,” Houghton said. “The underlying problem we’re solving is universal.”

The same logic extends to marketing. Popsa builds its own advertising in-house and expects to produce around 30,000 different video adverts across its markets this year, using AI to generate personas, dub languages and adapt creative assets market by market.

Profitable Without a War Chest

Popsa’s growth has been unusually self-funded for a company operating at this scale.

1. March 2016: Houghton co-founds Popsa in London with Tom Cohen, aiming to automate photo book design rather than build another editing app.
2. 2018: Popsa raised three million pounds from Pembroke VCT (roughly $4 million at the time), alongside Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups and advertising veteran Sir John Hegarty, a former Saatchi & Saatchi executive. Houghton described the photo book industry then as built on “a legacy of clunky and frustrating tools that force people to use Photoshop-style software with thousands of options.”
3. February 2022: Gresham House Ventures leads a nine million pound round joined by Guinness Global Investors and Octopus Investments. The same year, Popsa turns EBITDA-profitable, positive on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, a status Houghton says it has held ever since.
4. 2026: Revenue is on track to reach $70 million to $80 million, up from $58 million last year, a projected increase of roughly 21% to 38%.

Outside trackers do not fully agree on the lifetime total. Tracxn puts Popsa’s funding at $18.6 million across four rounds and 32 investors, while PitchBook estimates it closer to $24.9 million. Either way, it is a modest sum for a company Tracxn ranks 7th among 333 active competitors it tracks in the photo book category, behind only a handful of rivals including Shutterfly and Snapfish.

Houghton credits internal use of AI for the lean operation. Popsa now generates around $1.2 million in revenue per employee. “Because we’ve spent years developing AI for our customers, it was natural to use those same technologies internally,” he said. “AI now supports operations across virtually every part of the business, allowing our teams to achieve far more without simply working longer hours.”

That self-funded posture puts Popsa in different company from many AI startups currently raising venture rounds, including writing assistant Marker, which landed a $13 million seed round led by Index Ventures to build out its own product. Houghton says Popsa could still raise again someday. “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,” he said.

Betting Against a Flood of Synthetic Photos

Houghton was asked how Popsa thinks about AI-generated images, the kind that may increasingly turn up in people’s own camera rolls over the next few years.

“Ironically, I think the more synthetic content fills the internet, the more valuable genuine photographs become,” he said. “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 into Popsa if they want to, and Houghton says the company will not stop them. But he draws a line around what Popsa itself builds. “I don’t think our role is to become another image-generation platform,” he said. “Our value lies in helping people preserve and tell the stories behind their real memories.”

The camera roll keeps growing regardless. Whether anyone besides its owner ever sees the rest of it is still, for most people, an open question.