Pimento raised $3.2M betting generative AI belongs at the start of creative work

A generative AI tool that turns a text brief plus reference images into shareable mood boards of images, colours and text for creative teams.

That AI's best creative use is ideation and moodboarding — exploring more directions faster — not generating finished assets.

$3.2M (€3M) seed led by Partech and Cygni Capital.

French co-founders Tomás Yany and Florent Facq built Pimento around the observation that creativity is defined by the tools you use — and the reference-gathering step had no native tool of its own.

In Pimento you type a brief, add a handful of images, and generate images, text and colours tailored to that brief; you can merge two images you like, pick a colour from one, reuse text to generate more, or ask for variants, then share the board by link. It runs on fine-tuned open source models — Stable Diffusion and Llama, with Mistral AI planned — and its roadmap adds customisable boards for clients. Facq argues the future is not a chat prompt but several ways to interact with your content.

Everyone else sells finished images; Pimento sells the exploration phase where taste is actually formed.

Fine-tuned open source models (Stable Diffusion, Llama, Mistral) keep the stack cheap and customisable.

Iteration mechanics — merging, colour-picking, variants — are built for how creative review actually works.

The angel list is a go-to-market asset: exactly the design, dev-tool and gaming circles that would buy it.

Sell the messy first 10% of a workflow instead of the polished last mile: iteration is cheapest where nothing is final yet.

As of 7 December 2023, Pimento had released the product with its seed in hand and a roadmap for client-ready customisable boards; adoption figures were not yet published.