Quick answers
Did William Chan co-found Ideogram?
Yes. His own site, williamchan.ca, read on September 22, 2026, opens: "I am Cofounder and CTO of Ideogram. I work on research, engineering, and product." Wikipedia's article on Ideogram, read the same day, says the company was founded in 2022 by Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan, Chitwan Saharia and Jonathan Ho to develop a better text-to-image model.
Is this the same William Chan who worked on speech recognition?
Yes. The arXiv record for Listen, Attend and Spell, submitted August 5, 2015, lists William Chan as first author with Navdeep Jaitly, Quoc V. Le and Oriol Vinyals. williamchan.ca links that same paper among his own research contributions, alongside SpecAugment, Imagen and Imagen Video, and states he was previously a staff research scientist at Google Brain Toronto. The name is common, so the papers are the check.
What does William Chan do today?
His own site, checked September 22, 2026, still describes him as co-founder and CTO of Ideogram working on research, engineering and product. No independent page confirming a change of role was found, and search results carrying a different employer headline came from LinkedIn, which we do not treat as a source.
What is Ideogram?
A generative AI company known for text-to-image models that render readable text inside images. Wikipedia's article, read September 22, 2026, records a US$16.5-million seed round in August 2023 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, US$80 million raised in February 2024 after the 1.0 release, version 3.0 in March 2025, and version 4.0 released June 3, 2026 under the Apache 2.0 licence with downloadable weights.