Overview
- Product manager Naina Raisinghani coined 'Nano Banana' at 2:30 a.m., combining her personal nicknames into a last-minute codename.
- The model first appeared on LMArena under the codename for anonymous, crowd-sourced pairwise testing to gather unbiased human feedback.
- Users praised strong editing results, including likeness preservation and complex multi-image edits, which paired with the quirky name to fuel social virality.
- Google says the tool became the top-rated image-editing model and credits a day-one global release for rapid adoption, boosted by regional trends in Thailand and India.
- The team embedded the playful brand in the UI and swag, and with the launch of Gemini 3 Pro Image the branding has been upgraded to 'Nano Banana Pro'.