AI picture startup Ideogram will get $80M in Sequence 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 agency Andreseen Horowitz (a16z) have upped their funding in a rival picture technology startup, Ideogram, main the agency’s $80 million Sequence A financing, the 2 firms introduced in the present day.

As well as, Martin Casado, Basic Accomplice at a16z, is becoming a member of Ideogram’s board, and the corporate in the present day introduced a brand new model of its “skilled from scratch” picture producing mannequin, Ideogram 1.0, that “affords state-of-the-art textual content rendering, unprecedented photorealism and immediate adherence, and a brand new characteristic known as Magic Immediate,” in keeping with a weblog put up by the corporate.

Ideogram 1.0 is at the moment obtainable for customers to strive totally free on the corporate’s website, although it requires a Google or Apple account to log in. Customers can even generate pictures from inside the corporate’s Discord server.

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

Additionally becoming a member of in Ideogram’s $80 million Sequence 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 specialists 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 technology 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 immediately into AI generated pictures, one thing that rivals resembling Midjourney didn’t provide on the time.

Nonetheless, the sport has since modified significantly since then, with not solely Midjourney introducing textual content technology inside pictures as a part of its V6 launch, but in addition OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 introducing the characteristic for its customers as properly (accessible by way of ChatGPT). For instance, it’s attainable 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 turbines, which suggests Ideogram’s differentiator is lessened. Nonetheless, the outcomes usually are not all the time constant or aligned with what the consumer prompted, and Ideogram identified in its weblog put up asserting 1.0 and the Sequence A in the present day that its analysis exhibits human evaluators want Ideogram over Midjourney V6 and DALL-E 3. See the next graphs to assist these fundings:

But Ideogram additionally stood out when it first launched by providing customers the power to pick out from a spread of pre-curated picture kinds resembling “3D rendering, cinematic, portray, style, product, illustration, conceptual artwork, ukiyo-e.” Now the web site has additional developed to incorporate choices for various facet ratios, picture weights, public/personal 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, robotically expands on user-inputted textual content prompts to make them extra descriptive and detailed, producing ideally extra prime 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 robotically with new, extra vividly descriptive language, all within the background and invisible to the consumer.

These options make sense in that they may 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 neighborhood and doubtlessly enterprise customers and entrepreneurs, the appearance of Ideogram 1.0 and its continued funding to construct out the product may even probably result in a rise in spammy AI picture generations — already a rising downside on the internet — as latest examples present.

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