Wand.app, the AI-powered Creative Tool, Raises $4.2 Million in Seed Funding to Help Artists Bring Their Ideas to Life
Former co-founder of Muze to provide streamlined creative AI tool that offers artists greater control to create content that is consistent with their illustrations and style
Most AI creative tools provide limited control over the content they generate, which can be alienating to artists who have strong, specific visions for what they wish to create. Wand tries to bridge this gap with a combination of visual tools and personalization. On the visual side, Wand runs natively on tablets and lets artists guide an AI with illustrations to supplement text prompts with their understanding of visual forms — whereas on the personalization side, users can train custom models to understand their own styles or concepts with just a handful of images. These custom models then plug into all the tools within the app, enabling artists to generate content that is a reflection of their past work.
“We want to harness generative technology in a way that minimizes the gap between our imaginations and reality,” said Grant Davis, CEO of Wand.app. “What we don’t want is a future in which our methods for guiding AI are so limited and hands-off that this technology replaces our capacity for imagination and artistry.”
Wand.app is utilizing the funds for research and development and to grow their team. They recently hired CTO Jason Townes French and have released two research papers proposing new foundation model architectures whose training was made possible by GPU compute provided by Stability AI. They are also currently doing more research in the space of multimodal fine tuning.
"As an investor in both Stability AI and Wand, I'm delighted to see the synergistic way in which Wand and Stability are collaborating to improve the intuitively useful approach Wand is taking to give artists the tools to vastly improve their creativity and artistic work," said Jim O’Shaughnessy, who founded O’Shaughnessy Ventures and serves as a director on Stability AI’s board.
“The simple interface of Wand.app is what makes all the difference,” said Jason Townes French, CTO of Wand.app. “Knowing that we can now support artists to create their best work, means we’ve opened doors to a number of other industries, such as gaming, that can unlock unlimited potential in terms of what can be iterated and brought to life.”
The Wand team continues to add users from its growing waitlist and keeps those interested in the platform up to date via its Discord channel. The company plans to release some additional features in Q4 2023 and into 2024. To learn more visit wand.app.
About Wand Wand is a collaborative, AI-powered creative tool that gives artists the hands-on control and personalization they need in order to bring their specific ideas to life. Unlike most creative AI tools which emphasize text prompting, Wand emphasizes visual illustration as a means to guide models like Stable Diffusion. The team is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Contact Sofia Coon On behalf of Wand sofiakcoon@gmail.com
