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.
Flora CEO Weber Wong Image Credits: Flora
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.
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