Blackbird Ventures has led a two-tranche $US31 million ($47 million) investment round in image generation tools start-up Leonardo.Ai.
The round has been supported by Side Stage Ventures, Beijing-based Gaorong Capital, US firm Smash Capital − which was founded by three ex-Disney executives − video game focused TIRTA Ventures, Samsung Next, and others.
The investment comprises a $US7.5 million seed round and a $US23.5 million Series A round.
Founded by J.J. Fiasson, Jachin Bhasme, and Chris Gillis, Leonard.Ai launched late last year. The Sydney-based team claim their technology has already been used to generate more than 700 million images and trained more than 470,000 custom generative AI models.
Leonardo.ai recently launched an enterprise version of its technology platform which includes collaboration tools and enables hosting on private clouds.
Fiasson, the company’s chief executive, became interested in generative AI when Google Deep Dream was launched and explored the technology with his previous start-up, video games creation business Raini Studios.
“We started to think about the potential application of generative AI within the framework of content creation,” he said. “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, and I fell into that community and met a couple of passionate AI researchers who are now the co-founders of the company.”
Leonardo.ai was initially intended to focus on game asset content creation but the team then decided to build out the platform to cater for users beyond video games creation.
For the future, the team plan to focus on further widening of business to business (B2B) aspects of the platform.
Leonardo.ai’s technology has already attracted users in areas such as fashion, advertising and architecture as well as video games creation.
The company’s Live Canvas enables users to enter a text prompt, sketch ideas onto a painting canvas and enlist the help of AI to convert the sketch and text prompts to a finished image.
Leonardo.ai recently launched a new Image Guidance multiple control feature that enables intricate adjustments in areas such as vision depth and patterning.
The company’s AI was built on open-source technologies and then trained using synthetic data and data from Creative Commons. According to Fiasson, Leonardo.ai’s point of difference is that it provides greater control to users than other AI art platforms such as Adobe Firefly, BlueWillow and Midjourney.
Leonardo.ai plans to use the new capital to hire more sales and marketing staff and to build out its engineering team.
Image: An example of an image created using Leonardo.ai's technology.