Flora, a design tool used by designers at Alibaba, Brex, creative agency Pentagram, and entertainment company Lionsgate, has hit a new milestone. The startup has raised $42 million in Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, it announced on Tuesday.
Generative AI models can be used in the design process via prompts and other multimodal inputs. Software companies like Adobe, Figma, and Canva have also added features to make AI more central to their products. Meanwhile, newer design startups believe that to accommodate AI and test the capabilities of different models, you need new workflows and a different interface.
To address these evolving needs, Flora lets customers use image, text, or video to create media assets, including images and video. Users can also use prompts to create modifications to build new nodes with multiple iterations. These generated versions are mapped with each other on a canvas to give you a tractable flow of creation.
Users can then branch out from any node to create a new version of the concept or creative they are trying to make. For instance, if someone wants to create a marketing video, they can provide reference images and text prompts to create a concept. They can then add different prompts to make different videos in contrasting styles to see which one is better.
Flora’s CEO and founder, Weber Wong, was previously an investor at Menlo Ventures. After that, he joined New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, which fuses tech and art. Flora’s alpha version was launched in 2024 as part of the course.
The company launched a more stable version of the tool last year.
Wong said that he realized that there was an opportunity to create a new interface to stitch different models together and create an entire workflow in one screen.
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“Our realization [while building Flora] was that the generative computing paradigm needed a new creative interface. If you think about the personal computing paradigm, that’s what Adobe was for: controlling every single pixel on the screen to make one piece of media at a time. You now have these models that can make entire pieces of midea like that. So the natural creative opportunity is to take a step back and design the entire creative workflow,” he said.
Wong said that typically, node-based creation has been complex, but with AI in the mix, it allows designers to go through multiple iterations and ideas quickly. With Flora, you can use text, image, or video to create media or concepts.
The rise in generative models has made AI-first startups a hot commodity. In October, OpenAI acquired Sequioa-backed Visual Electric, and Figma acquired node-based editor Weavy. Separately, Krea, which also has a node-based editor, raised $83 million in April.
Wong noted that launches of tools like this bring an overlap of professionals and people using AI, resulting in more people using apps like Flora for design and ideation. Despite its demand, Wong thinks that for these tools to become more popular, there needs to be improved user education. For this, the company deploys creatives to work with other organizations and help them use Flora better.
While the startup’s slant is more towards creatives, the tool is easy enough to be used by business owners or individual users. Flora’s plans start from $16 per month (paid annually), and then scale up for agencies and enterprises.
Flora plans to use its newly acquired funding money to scale its enterprise sales capabilities. Plus, it wants to put more effort into marketing its product. On the product side, it wants to build better creative controls and also add some traditional editing capabilities so professionals don’t need to go to another tool to finish their project. The startup currently has 25 people, and it will possibly double or triple that headcount by the end of the year.
Redpoint Venture’s Alex Brad told TechCrunch that the venture firm’s team was impressed by the elegant design of the product and how easy it was for anyone to get started.
“Where we got excited about Flora is that the team is doing the same work as Figma of democratizing product design and bringing more people into the design process because of how they built the product to make it approachable and collaborative,” Brad said.
He added that from a market opportunity perspective, Flora can impact a broader creative process in industries like fashion, advertising, photography, and branding.
The Series A also saw participation from Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Twitch founder Justin Kan, Frame.io CEO Emery Wells, Hanabi Capital’s GP Mike Volpi, Menlo Ventures, a16z Games, Fal co-founders Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gur, and Batuhan Taskaya, Long Journey Ventures, Cyan Banister, Factorial Capital’s managing partner Matt Hartman, and MSCHF founder Gabe Whaley. With this raise, the company’s total funding to date has reached $52 million.
Source: techcrunch.com
