Generative AI startup Ideogram AI launches, closes $16.5m seed deal

• Other investors in the round included AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures and Two Small Fish Ventures
• Ideogram AI’s founding team consists of AI technology professionals who have previously led projects at Google Brain, UC Berkeley, CMU and the University of Toronto

Ideogram AI, a Toronto-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has launched with a seed financing totaling $16.5 million.

Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures led the round. Other investors included AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures as well as Ryan Dahl, Anjney Midha, Raquel Urtasun, Jeff Dean, Sarah Guo, Pieter Abbeel, Mahyar Salek, Soleio, Tom Preston-Werner and Andrej Karpathy.

In a statement, Ideogram AI said it is developing “state-of-the-art AI tools that will make creative expression more accessible, fun and efficient.”

Ideogram AI’s founding team consists of AI technology professionals who have previously led projects at Google Brain, UC Berkeley, CMU and the University of Toronto. Their prior work includes: denoising diffusion models, Google’s text-to-image system Imagen, Imagen Video for video synthesis, WaveGrad for speech synthesis, neural speech recognition, neural machine translation, contrastive learning for learning visual representations and generative adversarial imitation learning.