Flora raises $42 million to unify generative AI design tools in one creative platform

Node-based design tool Flora raises $42M from Redpoint Ventures

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. "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.

Flora raises $42M to unify generative AI design in a single platform

Flora raises $42M to unify generative AI design in a single platform Flora, the creator of an "intelligent canvas" platform for creative professionals, has raised $42 million in an early-stage round with a goal to tackle the fragmentation around generative artificial intelligence design tools. Led by Redpoint Ventures, today's Series A round also saw participation from a host of angel investors, including Vercel Inc. Chief Executive Guillermo Rauch, Twitch Interactive Inc. founder Justin Kan, Frame.io CEO Emery Wells, Hanabi Capital General Partner Mike Volpu and Features & Labels Inc. co-founders Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gur and Batuhan Taskaya. With the raise, Flora's total funding to date stands at $52 million. Flora, officially known as Flora and Fauna Flowershop Inc., is the creator of a generative AI platform that provides access to multiple text, image and video creation models in a single environment. Aimed at professional creators and designers, the platform enables users to create media assets using text, image or video-based prompts. Rather than develop its own generative AI models, Flora lets users choose from a range of third-party offerings, including Google LLC's Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Imagen 4 and Veo 3, OpenAI Group PBC's GPT-5 and GPT Image, Runway Inc.'s Aleph and Gen-4 Turbo, Stability AI Inc.'s Stable Diffusion 3.5, ByteDance Ltd.'s Seedream 4.0 and many others. In an interview with AdWeek, Flora CEO Weber Wong said he built Flora to cater to professional creators with a comprehensive platform that offers access to all of the most powerful creative AI tools available. "All these different models were fragmented across different companies, and fundamentally, all the AI tools are built by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative," he reasoned. "No one was building for the professional creative class and they were getting left behind." Flora's design process is based on a concept it calls "nodes," which allow for multiple interactions of the same design. Each new project kicks off with a new node, which is essentially the initial design, and from there they can branch out to create new versions of the same concept. The nodes are mapped with one another on a larger canvas, providing users with a more tractable creative flow. So someone creating a marketing video might begin with a text prompt describing their concept and a few reference images. Flora will generate a video, and the user can use different prompts to edit it and see which contrasting styles they prefer. According to Wong, Flora has already built up an impressive customer roster, with designers from companies such as Nike Inc., Levi Strauss & Co., Starz Entertainment Corp. and Pentagram Design Ltd. using the platform to accelerate creativity. They typically use Flora in the initial stage of asset design, as it allows them to quickly test new concepts and ideas. Later, they can scale the ones they like into full brand executions, with Flora making it possible to visualize new products in different scenarios. Although it's focused on serving professionals, Flora doesn't object to individual users signing up. It offers solo subscription plans that start from $16 per month, paid annually, with other options for businesses. Going forward, Flora will use the funding to expand its enterprise sales operations and marketing budget. On the product side, it plans to build more creative controls and add more traditional editing capabilities, so that users can finish their entire project within the Flora platform. It currently employs 25 people, and plans to double or maybe even triple that headcount by next year. Redpoint Ventures Managing Director Alex Bard said he's investing in Flora because of the unique way in which it blends rigorous engineering and business thinking with creative taste. "By enabling creatives to encode creative judgment and taste directly into workflows, Flora is building a unified environment that improves with use and compounds quality over time. We believe this is an architectural change in creative tooling, not an incremental one."