remove.bg

The product brief was brutal in its simplicity: remove a background from a photo in 5 seconds, with no manual selection, no Photoshop skills required, and no visible artifacts around hair. In 2019, that was a genuinely hard computer vision problem. Benjamin Groessing and David Fankhauser, two Austrian engineers bootstrapping Kaleido AI from Vienna with no investors and no runway, solved it and posted it online. Traffic came in waves. Then floods. By the end of 2020, remove.bg had processed over a billion images for more than 100 million users across 180 countries — more than Adobe's background removal tools, more than any startup had any business achieving with a team of 25 people and zero paid acquisition.

In February 2021, Canva acquired Kaleido for an estimated ~$100M — one of the largest Austrian startup exits on record — and the product continued operating independently under its own brand, now as part of Canva Austria GmbH alongside Unscreen (video background removal) and Designify (automated product photo editing). Today, remove.bg receives 60M+ monthly web visits, powers the Background Remover feature inside Canva used by 260 million monthly active users, and processes 150M+ image backgrounds every month for individual creators, Fortune 500 marketing teams, and e-commerce pipelines at Alibaba, Samsung, and the New York Times. The credit-based pricing model — with pay-as-you-go options that never expire and subscriptions starting at $8.10/month — has made it the default background removal tool across virtually every industry that works with product imagery at scale. Customers including Kemmetmueller Photography report dropping per-image editing time from 30 seconds to 8 seconds, saving over 87 days of manual editing across a single season.