Visual Electrica Sequoia Capital-backed company has released its AI-powered image creation tool for designers.
The company was founded in November 2022 by CEO Colin Dunn, a former executive at Universe, a mobile site. Dunn also worked at Facebook and Dropbox. Chief Product Officer Adam Menges, a former Apple employee whose startups Lobe (a design tool) and Low key (an AR game company) were acquired by Microsoft and Niantic. and Chief Technology Officer Zach Stiggelbout, who worked at Microsoft on Lobe.
![Mood selector for the Visual Electric image builder](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Moods.jpeg?w=680)
Image Credits: Visual Electric
Dunn told TechCrunch after a call that many AI-based image creation interfaces don’t focus on designers’ workflows.
“We started Visual Electric because genetic AI is an interface problem. Existing tools are based on a linear chat metaphor. But creativity isn’t linear, it’s messy. So we built our product around the creative process. Our productive canvas allows you to spread out, make a mess and work spatially,” he said.
Dunn said AI-based image generation is probably still in a “pre-ChatGPT era.” What he means is that existing imaging solutions have not reached the mass appeal of ChatGPT. Visual Electric launched its beta in February for graphic designers, creatives, and concept artists working at companies like Stripe, Affirm, and Riot Games, and design studios like Instrument and Manual.
The CEO reported that many of his existing users were looking for solutions where they could easily create an image and modify or iterate on it until they reached a satisfactory stage.
How does the platform work?
The interface is simple to get started: you have to type a prompt to get four options based on it on an infinite canvas. You can repeat as many times as you want to create a suitable image for your project. When composing a message, you can also choose a color palate, which colors to exclude, formatting, and mood, including Airbrush, Film, Cinematic, and Neon.
The tool is free to use, but there is a limit of 40 image generations per day. You can pay for the premium plan starting at $16 per month for better production speeds and unlimited image creation along with a license to use those images commercially. Visual Electric said that in both of these plans, any image you create is shared with the community. However, if you pay for the top $48 per month plan, your snaps are private and you get even better speed for creating images.
The tool also has features like ‘touch’ to modify different parts of a generated image with a prompt, an upgrade option for premium users, the ability to remove background or variations by changing the ‘creativity’ slider and a ‘remix’. feature to give an existing image a makeover.
The company was founded in 2022 and has raised $2.5 million in funding from Sequoia, BoxGroup and Designer Fund.
![The Touch Up feature in the Visual Electric Image Builder, which allows](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Touch-Up.jpeg?w=680)
Image Credits: Visual Electric
Visual Electric uses Stable Diffusion as the image generation model along with GPT-3.5 Turbo to power automatically generated suggestions. The tool also deploys GPT-4 to generate a prompt from an imported image.
The company does not yet have a mobile app, but is considering developing it next year.
In the last year, companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe, and even Getty Images have released many image creation tools. Chatbot platforms like ChatGPT and Poe have also incorporated image generations for easier access.
Visual Electric believes that focusing on a specific set of users will give it an advantage. Recently, other tools like Vercel and TLDraw — which recently collected an extra $2 million in funding — have also experimented with interface creation features.