Luma AI has released several important announcements, anchored by a Series B fundraise of $43M led by Andreessen Horowitz, with A16z partner Anjney Midha joining the Luma board. It appears that their existing investors, Amplify Partners, Matrix, NVIDIA, South Park Commons, and General Catalyst have exercised their pro rata and remain invested in the company.
EDIT: A16z has posted a blog regarding their investment.
In addition to the fundraise announcement, they're also announcing that Genie has expanded to their iOS app and in all web browsers with Genie 1.0. If you already have the Luma AI app, just update it and you will be ready to go. As a reminder, Genie is a a text-to-3D model capable of creating any 3d object in under 10 seconds with materials, quad mesh retopology, variable polycount, and in all standard formats! Genie remains free to use.
We also get a glimpse at the user base of Luma, coming in at over two million people! Wow that's a lot of radiance field generations. Amit Jain, Luma's CEO also commented that Genie's user base has exceeded 100,000 people within four weeks of launch. In order to power all of this, Luma has begun using a compute cluster of ~3,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train new AI models.
This most recent fundraise puts Luma at a valuation of somewhere between $2-300 million and has appeared to already be using the fresh capital to expand their team. They announced the hiring of Jiaming T Song from NVIDIA to be their Chief Scientist as well as Tuhin Kumar, from Apple to lead Luma's design.
Luma has also clarified what Matt Tancik's role will be. He is operating as the leader of the applied research team. Matt is one of the original authors of NeRF and if you look for the paper, you'll find it at matthewtancik.com.
As part of their roadmap, the Luma team is planning to double in size by the end of the year. As part of their hiring, their team page now reflects Vasuman Ravichandran, Sapna Benali, Terry Kim, Gernot Riegler, Robera Geleta, Ayaan Haque, Arthur Islamov, Alaa Qutaish, since I have last checked their team page.
There's a lot to be digested here and we will be updating the article accordingly.
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