AI image startup Ideogram gets $80M in Series A led by a16z

Taking a break from complaining about Google Gemini’s racially confused AI imagery, Marc Andreessen and his compatriots on the mega VC firm Andreseen Horowitz (a16z) have upped their funding in a rival picture era startup, Ideogram, main the agency’s $80 million Series A financing, the 2 firms introduced right this moment.

As well as, Martin Casado, Common Associate at a16z, is becoming a member of Ideogram’s board, and the corporate right this moment introduced a brand new model of its “educated from scratch” picture producing mannequin, Ideogram 1.0, that “provides state-of-the-art textual content rendering, unprecedented photorealism and immediate adherence, and a brand new characteristic known as Magic Immediate,” in response to a blog post by the company.

Ideogram 1.0 is at present out there for customers to attempt without spending a dime on the corporate’s web site, although it requires a Google or Apple account to log in. Customers also can generate pictures from inside the company’s Discord server.

The corporate provides a free tier for customers capped at 100 picture generations per day, alongside monthlty subscriptions permitting 400 every day pictures ($7 month-to-month, billed yearly as Fundamental tier), and limitless every day pictures ($16 per 30 days, billed yearly as Plus tier).

Additionally becoming a member of in Ideogram’s $80 million Collection A are prior investor Index Ventures, alongside newcomers Redpoint Ventures, Pear VC, and SV Angel. The corporate’s seed spherical was beforehand led by a16z and joined by AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, and business consultants Ryan Dahl, Anjney Midha, Raquel Urtasun, Jeff Dean, Sarah Guo, Pieter Abbeel, Mahyar Salek, Soleio, Tom Preston-Werner, and Andrej Karpathy.

Textual content and typography era in AI pictures is not a uniquely differentiating characteristic

Based by ex Google Mind AI researchers, Ideogram made waves when it first debuted in August 2023 by providing textual content and typography baked straight into AI generated pictures, one thing that rivals equivalent to Midjourney didn’t supply on the time.

Nonetheless, the sport has since modified significantly since then, with not solely Midjourney introducing textual content era inside pictures as a part of its V6 launch, but additionally OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 introducing the characteristic for its customers as properly (accessible by way of ChatGPT). For instance, it’s doable to have AI pictures generated with characters holding up indicators which have messages printed on them, or storefronts with legible signage.

These days, letter formation is extra accessible by means of a number of AI picture mills, which suggests Ideogram’s differentiator is lessened. Nonetheless, the outcomes aren’t all the time constant or aligned with what the consumer prompted, and Ideogram identified in its weblog put up saying 1.0 and the Collection A right this moment that its analysis exhibits human evaluators choose Ideogram over Midjourney V6 and DALL-E 3. See the next graphs to help these fundings:

But Ideogram additionally stood out when it first launched by providing customers the power to pick from a spread of pre-curated picture types equivalent to “3D rendering, cinematic, portray, vogue, product, illustration, conceptual artwork, ukiyo-e.” Now the web site has additional advanced to incorporate choices for various facet ratios, picture weights, public/non-public visibility of generations to different Ideogram customers, and a toggle to activate the brand new Magic Immediate characteristic (described additional down on this piece).

However Ideogram nonetheless seeks to face out with new options

Ideogram isn’t resting on its laurels, both. The corporate’s latest characteristic, Magic Immediate, mechanically expands on user-inputted textual content prompts to make them extra descriptive and detailed, producing ideally extra top quality imagery.

Nonetheless, this characteristic too is much like OpenAI’s integration of DALL-E 3 picture producing AI with ChatGPT, which additionally takes a consumer’s textual content immediate and modifies it mechanically with new, extra vividly descriptive language, all within the background and invisible to the consumer.

These options make sense in that they may also help a consumer higher talk with the underlying AI mannequin, successfully translating what the consumer wrote right into a extra machine-friendly format, with out the consumer having to do the work of trial and error (although in our expertise, a few of that is additionally nonetheless required).

Whereas undoubtedly thrilling for the burgeoning AI artwork group and doubtlessly enterprise customers and entrepreneurs, the appearance of Ideogram 1.0 and its continued funding to construct out the product can even probably result in a rise in spammy AI picture generations — already a rising downside on the internet — as current examples present.

VentureBeat makes use of Ideogram, Midjourney, DALL-E 3 and different AI instruments to create article imagery.