Wand.app, an AI-powered creative tool that offers artists the flexibility to manually customize and visualize their ideas, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Unlike AI-powered creative tools that provide limited control over the content they generate, which will be alienating to artists who’ve specific visions for what they wish to create, Wand tries to bridge this gap with a mixture of visual tools and personalization.
Founded in December 2021, Wand is the brainchild of CEO and founder Grant Davis. Although there are lots of tools that allow users to create complex images with text prompts, the last item Wand.app desires to do is use AI to interchange human creativity and imagination, Davis told TechCrunch.
“We must always strive towards a super where if an artist already has a selected visual in mind, they will use this tech to bring that exact vision to life without making any compromises,” Davis said. “Unfortunately, since words are too ambiguous to convey the small print of visual forms, compromises are inevitable when you may only guide these models with text prompts. Wand addresses this with an illustration tool that takes your sketches (whether it’s a brand recent drawing or a visible edit to an existing image) and turns them into fleshed out suggestions.”
Wand allows artists to show a private AI their very own style so as to receive results that look consistent with the particular aesthetic that they’re looking for. The editing process all lies inside a freeform art board where individuals or groups can work on iterating on their work.
Image Credits: Wand.app
The tool is currently being tested with a small group of beta testers. The corporate plans to launch Wand publicly in the approaching months.
“Wand caters more to artists and illustrators in comparison with other creative AI tools due to the way it rewards visual art skills,” Davis said. “Probably the most ideal users are folks whose work involves numerous prototyping, iteration, mood-boarding, or world-building with clients, teams, and/or creative directors. Some examples include game studios, concept artists, branding firms and designers. That being said, Wand is ultimately easy enough to be utilized by anyone, so I expect our user base to be a mix of pros and hobbyists.”
In the meanwhile, Wand has an in-app credit system so as to pay for the corporate’s GPU costs. Long run, Wand will consider subscription models. The pricing might be much like other creative AI products like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Dream Studio.
Davis says Wand differentiates itself from other AI-powered creative tools by running on mobile, tablet and, soon, on desktop. He notes that this permits the editing process to feel more fluid and allows the corporate to support more graphical tooling. Plus, artists can use the Apple Pencil for Wand’s illustration tools.
“Most other AI tools are more web focused,” Davis said. “Generally speaking, Wand focuses greater than other products on catering specifically to artists, and their illustration skills allow us to provide greater degrees of visual control without surfacing technical concepts or complex UIs.”
Image Credits: Wand.app
As for the brand new funding, Wand plans to make use of it to construct out collaborative team features, together with recent creative tooling that can extend to desktop. Wand can also be doing research on improving foundation model architectures and fine-tuning techniques.
The funding round included participation from Betaworks, Charge Ventures, Long Journey, Notation Capital, Twelve Below and BDMI. Angel investors include Amy Wu, Eden Chen, Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.
When it comes to the longer term, Wand is focused on exploring methods for artists to share or sell models they’ve fine-tuned on their work. Given the controversy around large foundation models being trained by scraping the net and including the work of artists who didn’t consent to their work getting used, Wand believes that a feature like this is able to be a start line for artists to be recognized and compensated for his or her work.
Nevertheless, Wand shouldn’t be rushing into constructing such a feature just yet, since it desires to be certain that the marketplace is capable of prevent malicious actors who would either attempt to steal the work of others or share harmful content.
Wand can also be focused on exploring applications to 3D modeling, as the corporate believes that there’ll come a degree through which one can design something in 2D and have an AI mechanically turn it right into a 3D model. Davis believes Wand could be the proper medium for this because its existing toolset naturally could extend to 3D.