Krea AI: The $500M startup fueling the new era of creators

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• 💨This startup helps artists turn their idea to reality in seconds

• 🚀 They’ve already hit $8M ARR, up 20x in the last 14 months

• 💰 They’ve just raised a $47M at a $500M valuation led by Bain Capital Ventures

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Krea AI 📈

🎨 Krea AI was founded by Diego Rodriguez and Victor Perez in March 2022 with the vision to help any creative learn how to use AI without being technical.

Artists aren’t the best at coding, but they are the ones who have the best ideas 💡. It was a shame they didn’t have the access to this tech to unlock their full potential.

Krea solves this by providing creative people with AI tools to generate art from images to videos, or enhance existing images and videos ✨.

Krea can generate images and videos in real-time through either an input image 📸, or just a single prompt 💬. With Krea you’re able to control the AI art you’re creating and own that art.

It’s a neo-creative medium of AI that can help any artist in any domain. They don’t want AI to just make images for you, but have it be a creative tool that fuels your creativity.

Here’s a quick demo 👉
🔗 https://x.com/krea_ai/status/1887886539398459533

Backstory 👀

Victor grew up in Barcelona and during all his teenage years was interested in creative things, especially music 🎶. He started playing instruments at the age of 8 and was even part of a band 🥁.

He was also into photography 📷, some 3D 🧊 and graffiti art 🎨 and generally had a lot of creative interest.

When it was time to leave school he was left with 2 choices:

• Study Classic Guitar at the Conservatory in Barcelona 🎼

• Go to regular university and study engineering 🧑‍🔬

He found middle ground in a university course: audio visual systems engineering in Barcelona, where he’d do engineering around sounds and images. 🎧

This is where he met Diego, a fellow student who had a big interest in AI 🤖 and its potential to transform the creative space. The year was 2015…

Diego explained his obsession with AI to Victor and the 2 quickly became friends 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽. Diego introduced Victor to coding and “generative adversarial networks” (AKA GANS) for Gen-AI image generation.

At first, Victor just did a ton of research on gen-AI image models and even co-authored some papers on the subject 📚.

He then tried using tech creatively and felt that coding was limiting the creative capabilities he had.

Python was clearly not the best interface to use this tech creatively – so he started building interfaces to communicate with AI to do artistic things.

This is when the very earliest versions of Krea started to appear… 🌱

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Getting into HF0 🛸

For anyone that doesn’t know, HF0 is an accelerator like Y Combinator 🚀, except it's a select group of 10 teams who work, eat and sleep together for 12 whole weeks 🧠⏳.

They're insane. 🤯 Last year one of their batches had:

• 4/10 teams break $2M in revenue during the 12 week program 💸

• One team got to $10M in revenue… 😳

Diego initially wasn’t part of the Krea team and had just been working on his communication skills through constantly applying to random jobs he didn’t have experience for 💼.

He then came across a post on Twitter by one of the HF0 founders where he was talking about the program. At the time it looked scrummy and they had 1,000 followers on Twitter.

Diego asked Victor to send him a video recording of him building his library for Krea to learn a bit more about how it works 📹. Victor recorded a 6 hour video showing everything.

Diego watched the entire video 🫡, and applied to HF0 talking about Victor’s startup.

They made it to the next stage, and Diego explained everything to Victor saying he applied purely to improve his communication skills.

“If you want, we can keep going forward and see where this goes”

They ended up getting into HF0 🎉, who flew both co-founders out to Miami 🌴.

Their mentality was “worst case scenario we spend a week in Miami, have a party and see each other.” 🍹🕺

Little did they know, HF0 was going to change their life. ✨

Stats 📊

They were handed their first investment check by HF0 💰 and by the end of the 12 weeks, they had 200,000 people on their waitlist after a reddit post went viral 🔥.

At that moment, they noticed Krea was creating a new type of creative medium. AI could execute whatever you needed 🧠.

Over the last 16 months, Krea has:

1. Rolled out 50 major product updates 🧪

2. Grown from 0 to over 22 million users organically 📈

💸 They’ve also just hit $8M in ARR, up 20x year over year 💥, with customers including creators at Perplexity AI, Loop Earplugs, Pixar, LEGO, and Samsung. 

🏠 They’ve achieved all of this with just a team of 8 working out of an apartment living room in SF. 

👥 The team has more recently expanded to 17 people, including: the main author of Lumina (state-of-the-art multimodal AI), the creator of Anifusion, brilliant engineers from MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.

💰On April 7th, Krea AI raised a $47 million Series B at a $500 million valuation led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from a16z, Abstract and Pebblebed bringing their total raised to $83 million. Previous investors include HF0, a founding member of OpenAI, co-founder of Meta AI, A*, and Gradient Ventures, Google's early-stage AI fund.

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