Ideogram

Facts

• ·Ideogram, Inc. was founded in 2022 by Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan, Chitwan Saharia, and Jonathan Ho, former Google Brain researchers and Imagen authors. Its headquarters are in Toronto: engineering roles are there and on-site only, while New York sales are hybrid (ideogram.ai/careers, snapshot 19.08.2026). It has raised 96,5 million $: a 16,5 million $ seed round (a16z, Index Ventures) and an 80 million $ Series A in February 2024; no new rounds had been announced as of 19.08.2026.
• ·Ideogram 4.0 launched on 03.06.2026 and became the company's first open-weights model: 9.3 billion parameters, a 34-layer DiT, Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct text encoder (hidden states from 13 intermediate layers are used), trained exclusively on structured JSON captions with style markup, element bounding boxes, and palettes, native 2K (ideogram.ai/blog/ideogram-4.0 and the ideogram-ai/ideogram-4-fp8 card on Hugging Face).
• ·The weights are open but not free: only the non-commercial license (Ideogram Non-Commercial Model Agreement) is free for research and personal projects, while self-hosting for commercial use costs 300 $/month, then enterprise (ideogram.ai/licensing, 19.08.2026). English Wikipedia calls the Ideogram 4.0 license Apache 2.0 — this is an error; the vendor's primary source says otherwise.
• ·Vendor measurements as of 19.08.2026: in Design Arena, Ideogram 4 ranks first among open models and trails only proprietary GPT and Gemini; in ContraLabs' blind typography test (ten professional designers), it takes first place in 47.9% of cases versus 30.0% for Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview (Nano Banana 2), 15.5% for FLUX.2 [max], and 15.0% for Grok Imagine 1.0; when asked “would you use this in real client work,” the same designers gave it 3.55 out of 5 versus 2.84 for Nano Banana 2.