AI Artistry: Exploring Wand's $4.2M Fundraise

0:00So WAND app is the brainchild of CEO and founder Grant Davis and it has successfully raised$2.4 million. This is their seed funding round, and this was actually spearheaded by Oshazny Ventures, and this actually started back in December of 2021. So WAND really kind of aims to resolve a significant pain point for artists by offering a personalized, AI-powered creative platform that goes beyond, you know, just the constraints of text prompts. So other participants in the funding round included Betaworks, ChargeVentures, Longjourney, Notion Capital, 12 Below, and BDMI, along with a bunch of different angel investors.

0:39I think they had like Amy Wu, Eden Chang, Jared Hetch, and Steve Martosi on there. So unlike a lot of conventional AI-driven creative tools, which often leave artists restricted and dissatisfied due to their kind of limited scope of customization, I think Juan's core technology allows users to manually adjust and visualize their artistic vision. So the platform really achieves this by essentially tying together visual tools with personalization features. So Davis in a recent interview said, quote, we should strive towards an ideal where if an artist already has a specific vision in mind, they can use this tech to bring that exact vision to life without making any compromises.

1:23So one of Juan's distinguishing features is the illustration tool that transfers user sketchers into refined suggestions, like I was mentioning earlier. And artists really have the capability to quote unquote teach their personal AI really kind of what their particular style is, allowing the generated artwork to kind of mirror their own aesthetic closely. This is really, really cool, right? Because I think this is a big problem that we're not seeing solved with tools like MidJourney where essentially it can generate an image for you or generate something for you, but it's kind of random and they're not the same every time.

1:57This is a really cool tool, in my opinion, for artists because they're still being able to leverage generative AI and not get left behind by that, but they're able to still put a little bit more of their vision in. Whereas like if I wanted a picture of an elf for like, I don't know, like let's say I'm making a movie on one of these AI video generators, but I needed like a character for that. So a picture to upload into that movie generator. So I'm getting it generated on mid journey. I say like elf with green hat blah blah blah It's gonna spit something out for me And then when I need that same like character in a different position, it'll be completely different So this tool is cool in a sense that you can kind of sketch out your character It can learn your own style And then you can kind of prompt it beyond that and just gives you a lot more customization and you're able to make you know one one generated image to the next look a lot more cohesive, which I think is really cool.

2:49So WAND's environment supports this kind of dynamic interaction with sort of a freeform artboard where individual users or groups can iterate on their work. Again, really cool features, right? Like getting groups to be able to work on this. Imagine if like mid-journey, you had like a bunch of people working on different components of like a picture. Very, very cool concept. In any case, I think in terms of accessibility and kind of user experience wand is different from typical web-focused ai creative tools the platform runs on mobile and tablet devices and is expected to extend to desktop systems soon so like that's super super cool um i think this cross-platform functionality kind of adds fluidity to the editing process and also accommodates a more robust graphical kind of tooling so artists even have the option to utilize apple pencil for further precision in one's illustration tools Again, just really specific for artists and I think a really great tool.

3:46So Davis, their CEO, noted, quote, most other AI tools are more web focused. Wand focuses more than other products on catering specifically to artists. So currently in its upcoming beta phase, Wand is expected to open to the public in the upcoming months. The primary target audience really comprises or comprises individuals and companies involved in prototyping. So you got like mood boarding and, you know, like world building and the sectors that stand to benefit the most, I think from one's offering include game studios, definitely are going to see a lot of, a lot of great use cases there. Also, I think branding firms, concept artists and architects.

4:31However, I will say the platform is designed to be quite user friendly. and so this is actually good for hobbyists as well. So for now, WAND essentially utilizes an in-app credit system to offset its GPU costs, but the company is considering adopting a subscription model similar to other creative AI services, like Dolly 2, MidJourney, Dream Studios, all of those just have subscription-based, so they might just do that as well. But WAND intends to allocate its newly acquired funds, this new round of funding that they just raised, towards the development of collaborative features and extending its tool set to desktop platforms.

5:07So the company is also kind of diving into research on refining foundation model architectures and fine-tuning techniques. So additionally, I believe WAND is exploring the possibility of allowing artists to share or monetize the AI models they've fine-tuned, but given the ethical concerns around large foundational models that scrape artists' data without consent, I think WAND sees this as a stepping stone for kind of recognizing and compensating artists. So looking ahead, the company is really interested in expanding into 3D modeling, which I think would be a very big use case here. And Davis believes that WAND could serve as an ideal platform to bridge the gap between 2D design and 3D models through AI.

5:49So I will say WAND is pretty cautious at the moment about rushing into these new features. And they're really just kind of prioritizing security measures to deter malicious actors from exploiting the platform and a bunch of things right now. but in the near future, I think they're going to have a lot of really exciting features they roll out that will be very, very useful for artists.