Pimento is a brand new French startup that’s utilizing generative AI in an fascinating manner as the corporate focuses on step one of inventive processes — ideation, brainstorming and moodboarding. And the corporate not too long ago raised a $3.2 million (€3 million) funding spherical from an fascinating record of buyers.

One of the simplest ways to explain Pimento is by speaking about individuals who may use a instrument like this. Inventive groups engaged on a model redesign, an advert marketing campaign, an upcoming online game, an animation film will open Pimento on the primary day of their new tasks. It’s the instrument that you simply use to start out the analysis course of.

These customers wish to compile a reference doc with pictures, textual content and colours that will likely be used down the highway for these tasks. They’ll function the principle inspiration and the primary pointers of the venture for different groups engaged on it.

And there’s a whole lot of forwards and backwards throughout this section as a result of purchasers or managers could be choosy and infrequently change their thoughts. They offer you a course for the subsequent assembly in two weeks, however then they don’t like what the inventive group brings to the desk so inventive staff have to start out from scratch once more.

Proper now, many inventive staff depend on Pinterest, Instagram, Behance, Canva and Figma to seek out pictures across the net and create temper boards. And in some ways, your creativity is outlined by the instruments that you simply use. The Pimento group hopes that it will possibly foster your creativity because of synthetic intelligence.

“It allows you to explore more directions more quickly, so that you can produce projects of higher quality,” co-founder Tomás Yany advised me. AI fashions “bring a wealth of knowledge that no designer will ever have. They’ve seen a lot of things, because they were originally trained with data from Japan and Latin America,” he added later within the dialog for example.

Pimento’s seed spherical was led by Partech and Cygni Capital. A number of angel buyers additionally participated within the spherical, reminiscent of Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face), Stanislas Polu (Mud), Thibaud Elzière (Hexa), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alan), Igor Manceau (former inventive director at Ubisoft), Jonathan Widawski (Maze), Alessandro Sabatelli (ex-Apple) and Nicolas Steegmann (ex-Stupeflix).

Picture Credit: Pimento

So how do you employ the instrument precisely? Pimento’s co-founders confirmed me a demo of the product. You first begin by typing some directions of what you’re trying to obtain along with your venture, a type of textual content temporary. You then add a handful of pictures that may function the premise of your venture.

After that, Pimento makes use of your directions with AI fashions that will help you give you pictures, textual content and colours. There are three buttons on the display screen that you need to use everytime you wish to generate pictures, textual content or colours.

If a few of Pimento’s propositions appear fascinating, it can save you them for later. Once you’re achieved, you possibly can generate a hyperlink and share a board with all the pictures, colours and textual content that you’ve got saved.

What makes Pimento completely different from utilizing an off-the-shelf image-generating AI mannequin is that every thing you generate in Pimento is tailor-made to your preliminary temporary — it turns into a type of inventive companion. Along with that, it’s also possible to iterate on Pimento’s output.

As an example, you possibly can choose two pictures that you simply like and merge them to iterate one step additional. You possibly can choose a coloration from a picture. You possibly can reuse textual content to generate extra pictures. You possibly can ask for extra picture variants.

“There’s a debate on how you interact with these AI models. I don’t think the future is a chat interface where you enter prompt,” co-founder Florent Facq advised me. It doesn’t imply that there’s no prompting in Pimento. However the firm plans to supply a number of methods to work together along with your content material.

Sooner or later, the corporate plans so as to add extra options, reminiscent of the flexibility to customise the board that you simply’re going to share with the group or the shopper. Proper now, the corporate makes use of fine-tuned open-source fashions, reminiscent of Secure Diffusion, Llama and shortly Mistral AI.

It’s clear that there’s an extended roadmap of latest options that might be fascinating for a product like Pimento. And the latest funding spherical will certainly assist with regards to product improvement. It’s additionally going to be fascinating to see how firms begin utilizing the product.