Midjourney competitor Ideogram closes $80-million Series A as it launches latest text-to-image model
Summary
Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Ideogram has raised $80 million in Series A funding, as the startup releases its 1.0 update to its text-to-image generation platform and new subscription model.American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from returning investor Index Ventures and new investors Redpoint Ventures, Pear VC, and SV Angel. Andreessen Horowitz co-led Ideograms $22.3-million CAD ($16.5 million USD) seed round following the startups launch just six months ago.Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has joined Ideograms board of directors as part of the financing.We have been investors in Ideogram since their seed round, and are very excited to lead their Series A as they continue to push the boundaries of generative model research, Cosado said in a recent blog post. Within 30 seconds, Ideogram will provide four different image interpretations of the provided prompt that users can download and freely use, or generate new image batches until they are satisfied.RELATED: Ideogram launches with $22.3 million CAD for generative AI text-to-image platform like DALL-EIdeogram said in a blog post that its Series A financing was raised to accelerate its growth and build more capable generative media models. Alongside improved photorealistic displays, Ideogram claims the update substantially reduces error rates in rendered text, with output images displaying legible and coherent text in a variety of fonts and styles. The basic subscription tier costs $7 USD per month and allows 400 uncompressed images per day while the plus subscription tier costs $16 USD per month and allows unlimited image generation.Ideograms CEO Mohammad Norouzi was previously a senior staff research scientist at Google and worked on Googles text-to-image system Imagen with fellow Ideogram co-founders Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, and Jonathan Ho.Mohammad, Jonathan, William, and Chitwan are among the pioneers of diffusion models and theyve created a consumer-grade user experience combined with state-of-the-art model research, Cosado wrote.Feature image generated by Ideogram with Alex Riehl prompt: Racoon wearing a Toronto Raptors jersey in Toronto with cinematic 3D rendering.