Announcing Genie 1.0 and Luma’s Series B
Luma's mission is to build multimodal AI to expand human imagination and capabilities.
We believe that multimodality is critical for intelligence. To go beyond language models and build more aware, capable and useful systems, the next step function change will come from vision. So, we are working on training and scaling up multimodal foundation models for systems that can see and understand, show and explain, and eventually interact with our world to effect change. We will deploy these systems to make a new kind of intelligent creative partner that can imagine with us. Free and away from the pressure of being creative. It’s for all of us whose imaginations have been constrained, who’ve had to channel vivid dreams through broken words, hoping others will see what we see in our mind’s eye. A partner that can help us show — not just tell.
Our story started with being able to capture and share our world. We are now embarking on the second chapter of this journey — one where we can imagine new ones.
As a first step, today we are thrilled to release Genie, a generative 3d model capable of creating any 3d object you can dream of in under 10 seconds. Genie can generate quad meshes and materials at any polygon count in standard formats making it suitable for wide ranging use cases. It is available today on web, in the Luma iOS app, as well as to our Discord community.
We are also incredibly excited to announce Luma’s Series B and to bring onboard Anjney Midha and Andreessen Horowitz. We are grateful for the continued support of our partners at Amplify, Matrix, NVIDIA, South Park Commons, and Angels who have helped us get to this milestone. This round brings us to $70 million raised so far and will accelerate our investments in foundation model compute, data, and growing the team.
“The big opportunity in generative AI is to enable billions of people to create what only a few could ever dream of doing before. Luma is leading this wave with a rare combination of both world class multimodal research and product design. Luma’s team brings together some of the most formidable scientists in computer vision, graphics and deep learning who have already shipped products used by millions of people. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Amit, Alex and team"
- Anjney Midha, General Partner, a16z
We are also honored to announce some phenomenal new additions to Luma! Jiaming Song is joining us from NVIDIA’s generative AI group as our Chief Scientist and will lead the foundation models research team. Matthew Tancik is joining us from Berkeley to lead the applied research team that will elevate our models into capable and delightful products. And finally, to lead Luma’s design discipline Tuhin Kumar is joining us from Apple Design Studio and will help us reimagine how interfaces, interactions, and products should feel and function in the generative world.
If our mission speaks to you, and you’d like to work with some of the best people in generative AI, join our small and nimble team. You’ll have radical ownership and grow immensely.
Alex and I couldn’t be more excited to build the future with this exceptional team. Everything we can imagine should be real!