Last week, Two Small Fish Ventures announced our most recent investment in Ideogram AI, a Toronto-based generative AI company. The company was founded by former Google Brain researchers and launched with $16.5 million USD ($22.3 million CAD) in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. The round was actually closed at the beginning of 2023. We can finally talk about it now, as the company was in stealth.

The founders of Ideogram – Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan, Chitwan Saharia and Jonathan Ho – are renowned scientists who pioneered research in generative AI text-to-image systems. They’re also “the brains” behind Google Brain’s Imagen (pun fully intended).

Ideogram’s new product is transformative as it has successfully addressed an issue that has plagued many popular AI image generators to date: producing reliable text in varying colours, fonts, sizes, and styles within an image – be it lettering on signs or company logos – with just a few clicks, words, or taps.

For instance, when I typed:

“Cartoonish happy animals with a big sign that says ‘animal kingdom’, vibrant, graffiti, typography.”

The result was excellent. I can already imagine so many new use cases that weren’t possible before.

Check it out on Ideogram.ai.