Generative AI As A Utility Will Empower SaaS Businesses

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.

Memorable: The AdMaker from LDV Capital on Vimeo

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!

Updated on January 15, 2025: In January 2025, the company announced their $180 million in a Series D round led by NEA, with participation from WiL, Atlassian Ventures, PSP Growth, and existing investors. Synthesia is now the UK’s most valuable generative AI media company and the worldwide market leader in enterprise AI video, with over 60,000 customers. This is a remarkable achievement in an industry largely dominated by U.S. and Chinese companies.

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 even starting 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!

Uizard Autodesigner: Text to design, automated - YouTube

“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.