Bay Area photography startup Polarr announced this morning that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A. The new round of funding, led by Threshold Ventures with participation from Pear Ventures and Cota Capital, brings the startup's total funding to around $12.5 million, according to the latest Crunchbase figures. At the moment, the company is probably best known for its photography app for iOS and Android, which utilizes machine learning and AI to improve image editing. The company says it has around four million monthly active users. This round of funding will go toward research and development, engineering and partnerships, the latter of which are starting to become a big business for Polarr. In fact, it's using the news to highlight the fact that it was tapped to bring its technology to the Samsung Galaxy S10's native camera app.

Polarr, a six-year-old San Jose computer vision startup cofounded by Stanford graduate and Google veterans Borui Wang and Derek Yan, today announced that it has secured $11.5 million in series A funding led by Threshold Ventures, with participation from Cota Capital and Pear Ventures. Wang said the fresh capital -- which brings its total raised to $13.5 million, according to Crunchbase -- will be used to accelerate research and development; expand platform and service support; and grow its technology partnerships in drone, home appliance, ecommerce, and image storage verticals. "As deep learning compute shifts from the cloud to edge devices, there is a growing opportunity to provide sophisticated and creative edge AI technologies to mobile devices," said Wang, who serves as CEO. "This new round of financing is a tangible endorsement of our approach to enable and inspire everyone to make beautiful creations." Threshold Ventures' Chris Kelley and Pear Ventures' Mar Hershenson will join Polarr's board of directors as part of the round.