AI picture startup Ideogram will get $80M in Collection 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 Collection A financing, the 2 corporations introduced as we speak.

As well as, Martin Casado, Normal Associate at a16z, is becoming a member of Ideogram’s board, and the corporate as we speak introduced a brand new model of its “skilled 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 referred to as Magic Immediate,” in response to a weblog put up by the corporate.

Ideogram 1.0 is presently out there for customers to attempt without cost on the corporate’s web site, although it requires a Google or Apple account to log in. Customers may also generate photos from inside the corporate’s Discord server.

The corporate provides a free tier for customers capped at 100 picture generations per day, alongside monthlty subscriptions permitting 400 day by day photos ($7 month-to-month, billed yearly as Primary tier), and limitless day by day photos ($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 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 photos is now 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 instantly into AI generated photos, one thing that rivals resembling Midjourney didn’t supply on the time.

Nonetheless, the sport has since modified significantly since then, with not solely Midjourney introducing textual content technology inside photos as a part of its V6 launch, but additionally OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 introducing the characteristic for its customers as nicely (accessible by way of ChatGPT). For instance, it’s attainable to have AI photos 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 a bunch of AI picture turbines, which implies Ideogram’s differentiator is lessened. Nonetheless, the outcomes should not all the time constant or aligned with what the person prompted, and Ideogram identified in its weblog put up asserting 1.0 and the Collection A as we speak that its analysis reveals 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 flexibility to pick out from a variety of pre-curated picture kinds resembling “3D rendering, cinematic, portray, trend, 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, robotically 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 just like OpenAI’s integration of DALL-E 3 picture producing AI with ChatGPT, which additionally takes a person’s textual content immediate and modifies it robotically with new, extra vividly descriptive language, all within the background and invisible to the person.

These options make sense in that they will help a person higher talk with the underlying AI mannequin, successfully translating what the person wrote right into a extra machine-friendly format, with out the person 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 probably enterprise customers and entrepreneurs, the appearance of Ideogram 1.0 and its continued funding to construct out the product may also seemingly result in a rise in spammy AI picture generations — already a rising drawback on the internet — as current examples present.

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