Ex-TikTok duo launches Superpose, an AI pose coach for selfies

Companies have increasingly used AI’s image-generation abilities to teach people photography skills — Google’s Camera Coach on Pixel phones guides framing and composition, and Adobe added a feature in its experimental camera app in July that uses AI to critique photos and suggest changes before capture. On the same theme, former TikTok employees Melody Chu and Jing Liu have launched Superpose, an iOS app that uses an AI guide to teach people how to pose for pictures.

Superpose functions as a camera app: users take a selfie or photo of a friend, and the app generates four potential poses using AI, some of them extravagant and, at times, uncanny in how they render. Users can save generated poses or use a match-pose feature to place themselves in the frame based on the app’s suggestions. Chu previously worked in product roles at Meta, Nextdoor, Roblox, TikTok, and Slack; Liu was a founding engineer at a 3D face-scanning startup and later worked on image and video models at TikTok.

Chu said the idea stemmed from a personal problem: “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,” she told TechCrunch. Superpose launched in July and has been downloaded more than 22,000 times so far, with users generating more than 190,000 poses. The app gives five free generations daily, with a pack of five additional generations for $2.99 or 20 generations for $9.99.

Chu acknowledged other companies are entering the AI-guided photography space, but said Superpose wants to focus specifically on becoming the best camera for portrait photos guided by AI, rather than generating AI backgrounds or fantastical imagery. “We want to lean into the core of memory capture versus, say, putting you in a fantastical place that you’ve never been,” Chu said. She also acknowledged some pose suggestions can look uncanny and said the company is improving generation styles, personalization, and in-viewfinder coaching. Superpose has raised $2.2 million from Khosla Ventures, Chinese selfie-app maker Meitu, and OVTR VC.

Why it matters

Superpose is betting that a narrow, well-executed niche — AI-coached real-life portraits — can carve out space against broader AI photo-editing apps that focus on generating entirely new scenes rather than improving how people capture themselves.