Sydney, Australia-based Leonardo.Ai is the one of many newest generative AI startups to lift funding. Right now, the AI artwork manufacturing platform for customers and enterprise customers introduced a $31 million USD spherical from buyers together with Blackbird, Facet Stage Ventures, Smash Capital, TIRTA Ventures, Gaorong Capital and Samsung Subsequent.
Based final yr, Leonardo.Ai’s founders say that since December, it has hit seven million customers, who’ve generated over 700 million photographs in complete. It just lately launched its enterprise model, which incorporates collaboration instruments and permits internet hosting on a non-public cloud. Enterprise customers additionally get entry to APIs to allow them to construct their very own tech infrastructure on high of Leonard.Ai’s platform, beginning with its manufacturing API.
Geared toward individuals in artistic industries together with gaming, promoting, trend and structure, Leonardo.Ai lets customers save, edit and construct a number of property in the identical fashion to allow them to be reused. They will additionally construct and practice their very own fashions for picture technology.
Some use instances embody storyboards for individuals in video manufacturing, or mockups of gaming characters. CEO and co-founder J.J. Fiasson turned inquisitive about generative AI when Google Deep Dream launched, and continued to discover generative AI at his final startup, gaming studio Raini Studios.
Leonardo’s workforce: Jachin Bhasme, J.J. Fiasson, Chris Gillis
“We started to think about the potential application of generative AI within the framework of content creation. It was still early days, in 2021, but we went down the rabbit hole playing with a lot of the generative AI tools that are out there, the open source ones that are out there, and I fell into that community and met a couple of passionate AI researchers who are now the co-founders of the company,” he tells TechCrunch.
Leonardo.Ai was initially meant to give attention to recreation asset content material creation, however then its workforce determined to construct out the platform to satisfy extra eventualities. “There’s a lot of different vertical use cases of the platform and we’ve built it in a way, and continue to build it in a way, that supports multiple use cases,” Fiasson says. “Part of our strategy moving into the future is expanding the B2B aspects of our platform.”
Leonardo.Ai’s AI was constructed on open supply applied sciences after which skilled utilizing artificial knowledge and knowledge from Artistic Commons. Fiasson says Leonardo.Ai differentiates from different generative AI artwork platforms like Adobe Firefly, BlueWillow and Midjourney by the quantity of management that it provides customers. For instance, its Dwell Canvas function allows customers to enter a textual content immediate after which make a fast sketch of what they need the tip outcome to appear to be. Because the consumer sketches, Leonardo.Ai creates a photorealistic picture based mostly on each textual content and sketch prompts in actual time.
“We think control means utility,” says Fiasson. “If you don’t have as much control, you’re just making pretty pictures, so that’s key to us.”
Leonardo.Ai’s new funding will permit it to rent extra gross sales and advertising and marketing workforce members because it scales out its enterprise product. It additionally plans to construct its engineering workforce.
