Generative AI platform Ideogram AI announced the completion of a $16.5 million seed round co-led by a16z and Index Ventures.
AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, Ryan Dahl, Raquel Urtasun, Jeff Dean, Sarah Guo, Pieter Abbeel, Mahyar Salek, Soleio, Tom Preston-Werner, and Andrej Karpathy backed the round.
Ideogram AI is a platform focused on developing state-of-the-art AI tools. The startup aims to empower individuals to tap into their creative potential through the prowess of generative artificial intelligence (AI). The company also announced that it will further unveil its set of AI-powered tools on August 23.
“We are pushing the limits of what’s possible with AI, with a focus on creativity and a high standard for trust and safety,” wrote the company.
The central team for Ideogram AI comprises a group of AI specialists, including Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan, Jonathan Ho, Chitwan Saharia, Shayaan Abdullah, Jenny Lei, and Jacob Lu.
They have been involved in notable AI endeavors at institutions like Google Brain, UC Berkeley, CMU, and the University of Toronto.
The team members have previously participated in the development of denoising diffusion models, Google’s text-to-image system “Imagen,” video synthesis capabilities, speech synthesis technology “WaveGrad,” neural speech recognition, neural machine translation, contrastive learning for visual representation, and generative adversarial imitation learning.
The startup is also currently looking for specialists in the engineering, research, design, and operations fields. Interested individuals based in Toronto can discover open positions on a dedicated page.
Source: mPost
