Toronto-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Ideogram has raised $80 million in Series A funding to accelerate the company’s growth in generative AI.
Waterloo Engineering alum William Chan (BASc ’11, computer engineering) co-founded Ideogram in 2022 “to help people become more creative”. The company officially launched just six months ago with $22.3 million in seed funding.
Ideogram is an AI text-to-image generator — much like DALL-E. Users type a prompt, click “generate” and within 30 seconds can choose between four image interpretations of the prompt. Users can generate more images using refined prompts until they get the one they like. All generated images are downloadable and users can use them freely.
On the back of the $80 million investment, Ideogram released its “1.0” platform update along with a new subscription model. The company blog says the update provides improved photorealistic displays, reduced errors rates in rendered texts and output images with legible and coherent text displayed in a range of fonts and styles.
The company plans to use the investment to advance its generative AI capabilities and expand its team with engineers, researchers, designers and operations people.
The Series A financing was led by American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with participation from returning investor Index Ventures and new investors Redpoint Ventures, Pear VC, and SV Angel.