Quick answers
Did Chitwan Saharia co-found Ideogram?
Yes. BetaKit's report on Ideogram's seed round (August 24, 2023) names him as one of the company's founders alongside Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan and Jonathan Ho, and says he worked on Google's text-to-image system Imagen. His own site at chitwansaharia.github.io describes him as "Co-founder and researcher at Ideogram AI" (checked 2026-09-21).
What is Ideogram?
A Toronto text-to-image company founded in 2022 by four researchers who had worked together at Google Brain. BetaKit (August 24, 2023) reported a US$16.5-million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, with AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures and Two Small Fish Ventures also participating. Wikipedia's article on the model records a further US$80-million round in February 2024.
What did Chitwan Saharia work on before Ideogram?
He was a research scientist at Google Brain in Toronto and is the first-listed author of "Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding", the Imagen paper posted to arXiv on May 23, 2022. His own site says he led development of Imagen, Imagen Video and Imagen Editor, and that the Imagen paper took an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay.
What does Chitwan Saharia do now?
No dated 2025 or 2026 page confirming his present role could be found (checked 2026-09-21). His personal site and an alphaXiv profile both list him as co-founder and researcher at Ideogram in Toronto since December 2022, but neither carries a publication date, and two commercial aggregators disagree with each other — one lists him as a former co-founder, another places him at a different employer. Treat the founder title as the reliable fact.