Generative AI As A Utility Will Empower SaaS Businesses

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Technical advancements work their way through the well-worn ups and downs of the hype cycle, and AI is no exception. Around a decade ago, we experienced the emergence of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), then Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and numerous advances in between. Now we are deep into another hype cycle of Generative AI and we are excited to see the arrival of new advances in this area.

The current cycle has gone beyond our technology echo chamber because the masses can now easily evolve photos and avatars into fantastical versions of themselves. These are playful, fun and sometimes feel like a gimmick. We forecasted this more than a year ago in our LDV Capital Insights Report published in September 2021 that the average person will have at least 3 digital versions of themselves both photorealistic & fantastical to participate online.

We at LDV Capital have been investing in AI for over 10 years since 2012, and as of today have made 8 investments in teams building businesses leveraging Generative AI since 2018: Synthesia, Uizard, Memorable AI, Headroom, Aquifer Motion, Earkick, Daimon Labs, and BurnerPage.

Tools powered by Generative AI range from automatically creating content for virtual worlds, creating/editing images and videos, designing websites in minutes, and more. There is also tremendous opportunity in biotech for leveraging Generative AI to exponentially reduce the duration and costs of testing and developing new medicine. Big pharma and emerging startups are already leveraging Generative AI to discover and design new therapeutics to fight diseases. Similar protein-language models could be used in various environmental applications. Producing better enzymes for degrading plastics, cleaning up oil spills and treating wastewater are just a few examples of inspiring computational biologists today.

“Generative AI techniques have exploded in popularity in recent years due to a perfect storm of weakly labeled big data, powerful GPUs, and innovative machine learning models. Formerly disparate tasks such as text-to-image, image in-painting, and style transfer are now available to everyday users in a unified framework that can run on a consumer laptop,” says Serge Belongie, director of the Pioneer Centre for AI in Denmark and LDV Expert.

According to IBISWorld, advertising is a $350B industry globally which makes it ripe for Generative AI to disrupt and empower. Memorable AI, one of our LDV Capital portfolio companies, is leveraging cognitive science and deep learning algorithms to maximize the memorability, saliency, and conversion potential of visual content.

Memorable AI optimizes the cognitive impact of ads to predict how consumers will respond to them.

The largest global advertisers including Unilever, L’Oréal, DIAGEO, Nissan, Bayer, and many more leverage Memorable AI to analyze their visual assets to maximize the branding and conversion impact of their advertisements. 

Previously, brands would rely on surveys and focus groups of their target audiences to A/B test yet-to-be-published ads. These legacy solutions take weeks and require budgets to give results, are not scalable, and the process is often inaccurate. 

Memorable’s platform provides marketers with instant, actionable insights based on the performance of the brand’s previous marketing campaigns and the best-performing ads published by their competitors in the same product category. Those insights help them iterate their content to maximize KPIs like CTR and Brand Association. Memorable supports advertisers throughout the entire creative process by providing technological solutions that enable the production of the most impactful ads while minimizing risks and costs.

They launched the Memorable Ad Maker – a tool that enables advertisers to generate ads from text and see which ads would perform better for their specific marketing objectives. Whether it's making the most Memorable ad or harvesting likes and shares on social media, the Ad Maker creates impactful images and instantly informs their marketing metrics. This way, the generation is guided by ROI and not only photorealism. ​​

“Memorable is the creative co-pilot to top advertisers from start to finish of the creative process. Our software provides intelligence that powers them to produce derisked and most impactful advertisements possible. Our Ad Maker is an exciting addition to our end-to-end software platform which enables our customers to generate advertising images that are optimized for marketing KPIs,” says Sebastian Acevedo, Co-Founder & CEO at Memorable AI.

Generative AI has Major Opportunities across Many Sectors

In April 2019, LDV Capital led Synthesia's Seed financing when they were pre-product and pre-revenue. Synthesia’s platform uses generative text-to-video technology to allow anyone to create photorealistic AI videos in minutes. Synthesia is a leapfrog improvement in content creation and replaces the need for physical cameras and complex video editing tools capitalizing on powerful generative AI technology to generate studio-quality videos.

Synthesia’s platform leverages generative AI to allow anyone to create photorealistic videos in minutes.

They are growing exponentially and their platform has over 12,000 customers including Google, Reuters, and Nike who create videos in 65 languages.

Synthesia is the evolution of a research project by one of Synthesia’s Co-Founders & Professor of Computer Science at The Technical University of Munich, Dr. Matthias Neissner, called Face2Face – a generative facial reenactive method that works with any off-the-shelf webcam to generate videos in real-time, which was presented in June 2016. Matthias’s keynote at our 7th Annual LDV Vision Summit goes into more detail on how Face2Face evolved to enable AI-empowered storytelling. 

With customers that include Fortune Global 500 companies as well as individual content creators, Synthesia demonstrates how generative AI can dramatically reduce the cost of video production at scale, create photorealistic videos for a wide variety of use cases that include corporate training, e-learning, personalized marketing, and even delivering a breaking news segment.

It’s still early days, but it is now more obvious than ever that AI will produce a significant amount of the content we will consume in the future.

Updated on June 13, 2023: Synthesia announced their exciting $90 million Series C financing. The round is led by Philippe Botteri at Accel along with NVIDIA and existing investors. The company now officially hits unicorn status, and we are extremely proud of the entire Synthesia team!

Can you tell the difference if it’s Bill Whitaker himself or his AI avatar? 

Leapfrog solutions leveraging generative AI will transform every industry from robotics to precision medicine, skin/beauty, agriculture, consumer electronics, fashion, and more. 

Generating Websites, UI/UX Mock-ups

We have always known that lots of mundane processes will be automated with AI - it wasn't the question of "if", it was the question of "when".

What started as a machine learning project in 2017 called pix2code evolved into Uizard – a rapid, AI-powered prototyping tool used for designing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes in minutes. 

Uizard’s platform leverages generative AI to allow anyone to design a product, website, or app by simply uploading a screenshot.

In March 2018, we led Uizard's pre-seed financing when they were pre-product and pre-revenue. Recently, Uizard announced their latest AI screenshot-to-mockup feature. Now anyone can turn any screenshot into a fully editable design automatically. Teams can iterate on their products and landing pages in seconds. Another generative AI feature available in Uizard is the ability to generate heat maps showing the areas of your design where users will focus their attention the most. Red areas mean high user focus, and blue areas mean low focus. You get key insights in seconds before to even start doing user testing. Additionally, you can get AI-generated UI components and themes from any screenshot or image. You basically can "copy/paste" the style of any app or website into your project.

Design used to be typically reserved for a select few who had the necessary training and expertise. However, with AI, Uizard empowers those with little design and technical experience to contribute to the design process to enable companies to ship better products faster. AI-powered design tools are the future!

“Software is eating the world, and great design is key to great software. With AI-powered tools like Uizard, even those with little design and technical experience can take an active part in the design process and enable their company to ship better products faster. AI will ultimately enable the democratization of design,” says Tony Beltramelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Uizard.

Updated on Feb 23, 2023: Uizard’s Autodesigner is the latest AI design feature enabling anyone to generate multi-screen mockups by typing project ideas in plain English.

Investing in Artificial Intelligence for Over a Decade

Visual tech is a critical data source that enables most applications leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver value. 

At LDV Capital, we invest in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. A majority of data humans analyze is visual so the majority of data AI will analyze will have to be visual to succeed. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. Founded in 2012, we are the only venture capital firm with this thesis. 

In 2014, we hosted our first LDV Vision Summit which is the premier global gathering of people in the visual tech sector.

2018 ECVC winner, Ryan Benmalek, presents Neural Painter, a novel method for designing and prototyping things by describing them. © LDV Vision Summit/Robert Wright

Here’s a flashback to 2018, when the winner of our Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge (ECVC), Ryan Benmalek – a Ph.D student studying computer science at Cornell University’s Computer Vision Lab under LDV Expert Serge Belongie, wowed the crowd at our 5th LDV Vision Summit as he presented the “Neural Painter”, a novel method to design & prototype anything you can imagine by simply describing it. 

Ryan tasked the Neural Painter with generating a photo of birds that would never be photographed together because they are from different parts of the world and live in different climates. Not only was the Neural Painter able to generate a professional quality photo, but it was also able to design the photo piece-by-piece iteratively – paving the way for humans to interact with computers in a conversational way to design, prototype, and make anything they can imagine.

In his presentation, Ryan described how the Neural Painter could be extremely valuable for difficult, labor-intensive industries such as industrial design and animation. 

After winning the competition, I’ve had regular calls with Ryan for the past four years to brainstorm how applications related to Ryan’s deep tech expertise will revolutionize the world as we know it today. The idea of building the next-generation human-like emotional AI platform excited the team of founders the most and led to the formation of Daimon Labs.

We are thrilled to invite you to our 10th Annual LDV Vision Summit  (virtual) on March 21, 2024 – the premier global gathering that showcases cutting-edge computer vision, machine learning and AI solutions to improve the world we live in. Sign up now for your free ticket.

Selected LDV Interviews & Keynotes Dating back to 2015

Below are selected interviews and keynotes related to Generative AI starting from 2015 from our Annual Vision Summits, Women Leading Visual Tech interview series, and Insights Events: 

2023

March 2023: 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit. Keynotes:

2022

December 2022: LDV led Seed Financing of Memorable AI. Memorable’s AI improves branding and performance of visual advertising content. Test & optimize your visual assets in seconds with deep learning models based on cognitive science and millions of human reactions.

November 2022: LDV led Seed financing of Daimon Labs, the deep tech team building generative AI and large language models that power their flagship product – a chatbot with human-like empathy.

March 2022: 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit. Ilke Demir, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Intel, spoke about Geometric Deep Learning as a Portal to Metaverse.

2021

December 2021: LDV led Seed financing of Aquifer Motion. Aquifer’s AI-powered animation platform gives content creators with no technical animation skills the power to produce cinematic-quality animated content in minutes. 

September 2021: LDV Insights report, “Content & the Metaverse are Powered by Visual Tech”, showcased breakthroughs in visual technology that are fueling the next evolution of content creation.

September 2021: LDV Insights Virtual Event “How Visual Tech is Fueling the Creator Economy”. 

Keynotes:

August 2021: LDV led Pre-Seed financing of BurnerPage - the team builds a SaaS AI-powered platform to deliver autonomous optimization for web page conversions with Generative AI.

July 2021: Women Leading Visual Tech interview series. Dr. Lydia Chilton, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, covered the topic of AI generating Visual Content for Social Media.

March 2021: 7th Annual Vision Summit. Matthias Niessner, co-founder of Synthesia and a Professor at the Technical University of Munich, gave a keynote speech on the State of the Art Neural Rendering and the Future of Content Creation.

2020

October 2020: LDV invests in Headroom Seed financing. Headroom helps people have better meetings using AI. Their mission is to improve communication in meetings through greater awareness of each other. 

“Generative AI is super powerful together with very careful curation, both from training as well as inference sides – digilent training data selection, as well as prompt engineering. At Headroom, Generative AI is used to summarize human interactions and create multimodal highlights. With these new tools, the combination of humans and machines has gotten a lot stronger,” says Andrew Rabinovich, Co-founder and CEO of Headroom & LDV Expert.

August 2020: Women Leading Visual Tech interview series. Dr. Lourdes Agapito, Professor of 3D Vision in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and Co-Founder of Synthesia: Synthetic Media and Its Way To Transform The Film Industry, Online Shopping & More.

2019

April 2019: LDV led Seed financing of Synthesia. Synthesia creates professional AI-powered videos from a text in 65 languages. 

2018

May 2018: 5th Annual Vision Summit. Keynotes: 

Entrepreneurship Computer Vision Competition (ECVC):

March 2018: LDV led Pre-Seed financing of Uizard. Uizard is a rapid, AI-powered prototyping tool used for designing wireframes, mockups, and prototypes in minutes. 

2015

May 2015: 2nd Annual Vision Summit. Andrew Rabinovich, CEO & Co-Founder of Headroom, gave a keynote speech, Automating the Black Magic in Deep Learning.

We invest in deep tech teams building businesses powered by visual tech based in North America, Europe, or Israel. Reach out if launching a startup powered by visual tech and artificial intelligence.