‣ Company: Wombo
‣ Cofounders: Angad Arneja, Ben-Zion Benkhin, Vivek Bhakta, Akshat Jagga, Paul Pavel, and Parshant Utam
‣ Mission: To help people bring their imagination to life using the magic of AI
‣ App launched: 2020
‣ Team size: 20
‣ Go-to emoji: ✨
Dream by Wombo is an art app that takes care of the most difficult part of the creative process—actually making the art. Using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), it generates an original illustration on the fly based on a few words you provide.
Despite the complexity of the artificial intelligence behind it, the app is simple to use: Type in a phrase—maybe “gorillas on a rollercoaster”—then select one of 32 art styles.
“Not everyone has time to become an amazing artist,” says Wombo CEO and cofounder Ben-Zion Benkhin. “There’s something very powerful about removing some of the technical barriers associated with creation.”
Benkhin has seen people use Dream for a variety of purposes, from visualizing their Dungeons & Dragons characters to transforming their thesis titles into art. We spoke to him about his favorite ways to use the app and why his total lack of work-life balance brings him so much joy.
In a nutshell, how does Dream work?
There’s an AI model that’s trained on hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of image-text pairs. Say you have an image of a dog, and a caption that says “cute dog with figures.” Basically this model has learned the relationship between text and image.
Any recommendations for people who are new to your app?
Just play around with it. Let your imagination loose and write whatever you want. I’ve found at least two approaches to generating beautiful images: The first is classical “prompt engineering”—packing your prompt with keywords, like “cute dog” and “Picasso.” The other is to creatively combine different concepts or ideas, like “midnight in the Garden of Eden.” Those types of phrases can produce stunning images.
How do you hope Dream impacts people’s perception of AI?
AI can be something that augments and enhances human creativity and potential. My vision and hope is that the products Wombo continues to make will be sidekicks to human creativity and human potential, and that they’ll help people make amazing things and bring their imagination to life.
You’ve created two AI-powered apps. What first drew you to artificial intelligence?
Over the past decade, there’s been a resurgence of interest in AI. As an undergraduate student in Toronto, I watched this deep learning revolution unfold. AI used to be a thing only PhDs and postgrads with a decade of academic experience could interact with. But the infrastructure and technology has evolved.
What’s your work-life balance like these days?
I’m probably not the best role model. I go to sleep when I get tired and wake up when I need to. Wombo is my life, and I spend almost all of my time thinking or working on it. I love it this way. This is what I want to be doing. I feel extremely grateful to be able to spend my time on this.
Do you have any advice for other app creators?
Don’t rely on the experts to figure out what’s interesting or what’s possible. Ultimately the only metric for success that matters for a given product is people using it and loving it. The only thing that matters is what the end user thinks. I pay close attention to the real world.
Wombo is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.