Toronto based Ideogram Closes Huge $80 Million Series A

Can Ideogram compete with Midjourney?

Hey Everyone,

If you didn’t know, Ideogram is yet another startup founded by former Google people. Former Google Brain researchers had launched a new synthetic media AI startup called Ideogram with Seed funding in August, 2023 led by a16z and Index funds.

It seems as if things have gone well for the Midjourney competitor. Just as we have Cohere, and others, Toronto’s AI scene is not to be denied.

This as the startup releases its “1.0” update to its text-to-image generation platform and new subscription model. The CEO is Mohammad Norouzi.

Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in North America with incredible Universities so it’s going to have a lot of AI talent.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from returning investor Index Ventures and new investors Redpoint Ventures, Pear VC, and SV Angel. It had already raised a seed round of $22.3 million. So consider it well funded and moving relatively fast.

Angels and Seed

Canadian computer science professor and Waabi founder Raquel Urtasun also invested in Ideogram’s seed round, as did Conviction founder Sarah Guo and Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, among others.

Ideogram’s founding team consists of people who have previously led AI projects at Google Brain, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto. Its CEO Mohammad Norouzi, for example, was a senior staff research scientist at Google.

Several other investors participated in the round, including AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, and industry experts Ryan Dahl, Anjney Midha, Raquel Urtasun, Jeff Dean, Sarah Guo, Pieter Abbeel, Mahyar Salek, Soleio, Tom Preston-Werner, Andrej Karpathy.

The quality of the Angels is high.

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While it’s hard to say how Stability AI is doing, Midjourney is bootstrapping and doing very well. There’s still room for a lot of major players in text-to-image in general.

Stability AI is at a Crucial Crossroads

🎨 By developing state-of-the-art generative AI methods, Ideogram aims to make creative expression more accessible, fun, and efficient.