The first time we hung out with Diego Rodriguez and Victor Perez at Krea, sitting cross-legged on bean bags (their office chairs hadn’t come in yet) that littered their Pacific Heights office-home-boxing-gym, they flipped the script. Instead of us asking them about Krea, they asked us about design.

They wanted to know our favorite design tools, and why they resonated with us. They wanted to see our signature creations with Krea, and recorded detailed notes on our impressions of the various features that Krea offers designers. They leaned in when we talked about our frustrations with other products.

We met them again several times that week, riffing on what Krea could become across videos, images and animation. From brand and marketing assets to software and hardware products, creative work is bound by the quality and cohesiveness of creative tools.

With Krea, millions of designers harness the latest in generative models with greater control and flexibility than was possible before. The result is a flourishing of creative activity, with users designing everything from British sports cars to astronaut suits to streetwear.

From assisting creatives to unlocking the potential of creative teams

Design is an inherently collaborative process, with explorations refined by team feedback and critique. Design teams across entertainment, technology, advertising, e-commerce and education use Krea today to dramatically accelerate the creative exploration process. Instead of moving artifacts from one tool to another, designing in one place and sharing from another, Krea users work on projects end-to-end within a single platform.

The result is wide-sweeping changes to the way creative teams work. Suddenly, teams can use one product to generate multiple ideas and campaigns that all follow a custom design style. Giants like Coca-Cola have already begun experimenting with AI-powered advertising, and creative departments across the world are beginning to rely on generative AI to produce more personalized campaigns in hours instead of weeks.

“The magic of Krea,” in the words of our own Head of Design, Annie Clark, “is in amplifying a user’s unique creative identity. It’s all about refinement and personalization--being able to fine-tune within my own workspace and style. The end goal is style adaptability.”

Companies like Perplexity, Pixar, Lego and Samsung are already using Krea in their creative workflows, prototyping visuals and imagining the next iteration of their products. Over time, the product will add more collaboration and generation features to enable org-wide design. According to Victor, “Our mission is to put creators in control – giving them an AI collaborator that adapts to their vision. It’s always made by you with AI, never just made by AI.”

Street art meets Silicon Valley

Co-founders Victor and Diego hail from Spain and met in Barcelona while studying Audiovisual Systems Engineering. Later, they were each granted a full scholarship by the King of Spain to continue their studies at Cornell.

Sharing a home country and a college, they deepened their friendship through Victor’s love of graffiti art and graphic design and Diego’s work in digital art and 3D architectural visualization. After working together on a project that was a precursor to Krea, Victor persuaded Diego to drop out of Cornell with him and ultimately move to Berkeley to focus on vision modeling and generative art.

Victor and Diego are opinionated about product choices, meticulous in attention to detail and hold an exceptionally high bar for each other and their teammates. Simply put, they care. As Diego shared with Cerebral Valley, “The people working on [Krea] are musicians, poets, photographers, graffiti artists and writers who also happen to be great at playing with computers and artificial intelligence.”

Outpacing the Frontier

Krea integrates the most advanced models from several leading labs in a creator-friendly platform, with the insight that better paints don’t matter if artists don’t also have better brushes, easels and canvases.

“By unifying the most advanced models in a creator-friendly platform, we’re giving artists and designers a co-pilot that accelerates their work while keeping them in full control of the process,” says Victor.

To deliver a product that creatives love, Krea conducts thorough AI research and invests heavily in infrastructure and AI optimization to give creatives more control and access to leading-edge technology. They put in hours of unseen work to grant artists more control and at top speeds. For example, they have the fastest Flux implementation in the market and the fastest Wan 2.1.

As image and video generation models improve, Krea will launch hyper-personalization features so creators can have AI models that truly understand their taste and aesthetic preferences. The focus is on making models useful for real design problems, with AI as a helpful teammate.

“Krea is all about creative empowerment,” said Victor. “We believe that AI should amplify human imagination, not automate it away.”