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Ideogram is officially in the competition for text-to-image models as it raises a massive A round.

What is the news?

Toronto-based Ideogram announced that it raised a USD 80m round led by Andreseen Horowtiz with participation from Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Pear VC, and SV Angel.

What does Ideogram do?

Ideogram competes in the generative image space. Users provide text-based prompts and Ideogram generates an image based on the prompt.

How did Ideogram compete against Midjourney and other image-generating startups?

When it first launched in August 2023 it was the first image generator to offer text and typography in its AI-generated images.

It has continued to distinguish itself by offering curation beyond promoting (e.g. different aspect ratios, image weights, visibility of the image produced, etc) and by enriching the original prompt with additional details to get better images.

Why raise so much so quickly?

Training LLM models is expensive in computing and data. Ideogram entered a competitive market and most likely needs capital to innovate as rapidly as its peers to stay in the game.

What does this mean for the community?

The foundation for the AI revolution over the past decade was kicked off by research at Canadian universities. Despite this, we don't have many homegrown AI champions.

ElementAI was acquired and is now the backbone of ServiceNow's AI offerings.

We have Cohere competing in text LLM space and now, hopefully, we have Ideogram representing Canada in the image area.

As an ecosystem, we have to build the muscle to commercialize the technology we create.

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