sweet spicy It is a new French startup that uses generative AI in an interesting way as the company focuses on the first step of the creative processes – ideation, brainstorming and mood boarding. The company recently raised a $3.2 million (€3 million) funding round from an interesting list of investors.
The best way to describe Pimento is to talk about people who can use a tool like this. Creative teams working on a brand redesign, an ad campaign, an upcoming video game, and an animated film will open Pimento on the first day of their new projects. It’s the tool you use to start your search.
These users want to compile a reference document containing images, text, and colors that will be used in the future for these projects. They will serve as the main inspiration and first guidelines for the project for other teams working on it.
There is a lot of back and forth during this stage because clients or managers can be picky and often change their minds. They give you a direction for the next meeting in two weeks, but then they don’t like what the creative team brings to the table, so the creative workers have to start from scratch again.
Today, many creative workers rely on Pinterest, Instagram, Behance, Canva, and Figma to find images across the web and create mood boards. In many ways, your creativity is determined by the tools you use. The Pimento team hopes that it can boost your creativity thanks to artificial intelligence.
“It allows you to explore more directions more quickly, so you can produce higher quality projects,” co-founder Thomas Yanni told me. AI models “bring a wealth of knowledge that no designer would ever have. They’ve seen a lot of things, because they were originally trained with data from Japan and Latin America,” he added later in the conversation as an example.
Partech and Cygni Capital led the Pimento seed round. Several angel investors also participated in the round, such as Julien Schumond (Face Hug), Stanislas Bülow (Dust), Thibaud Elzière (Hexa), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alain), Igor Manso (former creative director at Ubisoft), and Jonathan Widowski. (Maze), Alessandro Sabbatelli (ex-Apple) and Nicholas Stegmann (ex-Stupeflix).
Image credits: sweet spicy
So how exactly do you use the tool? The Pimento founders showed me a demo of the product. You first start by writing some instructions about what you want to achieve with your project, a kind of summary text. You can then add a set of images that will serve as the basis for your project.
Pimento then uses your instructions with AI models to help you come up with images, text, and colors. There are three on-screen buttons that you can use whenever you want to create images, text, or colors.
If some of Pimento’s suggestions sound interesting, you can save them for later. When you’re done, you can create a link and share a palette containing all the images, colors, and text you’ve saved.
What makes Pimento different from using an off-the-shelf AI model to create images is that everything you create in Pimento is tailored to your initial brief – and becomes a kind of creative companion. In addition, you can also iterate over the Pimento output.
For example, you can select two images you want and combine them to take it one step further. You can choose the color from the picture. You can reuse text to create more images. You can order more image variants.
“There is debate about how to interact with these AI models. “I don’t think the future will be a chat interface where you enter a prompt,” co-founder Florent Fack told me. That’s not to say there aren’t any prompts in Pimento. But the company plans to introduce several Ways to interact with your content.
In the future, the company plans to add more features, such as the ability to customize the board that you will share with the team or client. Currently, the company uses accurate open source models, such as Stable Diffusion, Llama, and soon Mistral AI.
There’s clearly a long roadmap of new features that could be interesting for a product like Pimento. The latest funding round will definitely help when it comes to product development. It will also be interesting to see how companies start using the product.
![](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Pimento_team.jpg)
Image credits: sweet spicy