The Creative Environment for the Generative Era

The generative computing paradigm needs a new creative interface.

FLORA has raised a $42M Series A to build a unified creative environment for the generative era. The round is led by Alex Bard and Jordan Segall at Redpoint Ventures, with participation from the CEOs of Vercel (Guillermo Rauch), Frame.io (Emery Wells), and Fal (Burkay, Gorkem, and Batuhan). This brings our total capital raised to $52M, alongside existing investors including Mike Volpi at Hanabi, Menlo Ventures, a16z Speedrun, Long Journey Ventures, Company Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Justin Kan (founder of Twitch), Cyan Banister, Matt Hartman at Factorial, and Gabe Whaley (founder of MSCHF).

FLORA is already used by millions of creatives at teams including Pentagram, AKQA, Red Antler, Lionsgate, and MSCHF. Creative teams are running real production workflows inside FLORA every day: brand systems that generate hundreds of on-brief assets in seconds, campaign concept pipelines that explore dozens of directions before a single meeting, and creative workflows that compress weeks of iterative work into hours without sacrificing taste or intent.

We’re grateful to see leading creative teams using FLORA for real work every day, but we're just getting started. To understand where we’re going, it helps to understand where we’re coming from.

A toy, not a power tool

I started FLORA while working on art projects at NYU ITP, a graduate program where we use technology to make art.

At the time, creative AI tools were improving quickly, but they weren’t built for professionals. Models were fragmented, and interfaces were designed for consumers rather than for professional creative work. Creative control was largely absent.

Creating with AI felt like a slot machine. You asked, you hoped, you tried again. They were toys, not power tools.

FLORA was built to resolve that mismatch. Not by chasing the latest models, but by rethinking the creative interface itself.

A new paradigm needs a new creative interface

Every new creative technology demands a new interface.

In 1982, John Warnock founded Adobe with a clear goal: to build creative interfaces for the personal computing paradigm. The interfaces Adobe introduced went on to define professional creative interfaces for the next 4 decades.

Since Adobe Illustrator in 1987, all image editing has been about altering and reordering layers. Since Adobe Premiere in 1991, all video editing has been about altering and reordering time.

Traditional creative tools are all bottoms-up - piece by piece, layer by layer, you build up your creative result. It’s like crafting.

Creating with AI is the opposite: it’s tops-down. You just ask for what you want, get a rough, 80% version, then chisel away at the details until you get exactly what you want. It’s more like carving.

This makes for a significantly faster creative process where you can just speak your ideas into existence, but today’s AI tools fail at the most important moment: the later steps. They give you speed at the beginning, then take away control when precision matters most. And as all creatives know, it doesn’t matter unless your final output is exactly what you want.

That’s why we’re building an AI-native interface that lets you go 0 to 80% extremely quickly, but are also layering in professional-grade editing control so you can finish your creative work in FLORA as well. We want to give creatives the best of both worlds. 

There is also a deeper mismatch between traditional creative interfaces and the generative computing era.

Traditional creative tools are designed to produce one piece of media at a time: a single image, a single layout, a single frame.

In the generative era, producing an individual asset is trivial. You can do it with the snap of your fingers.

So the real creative opportunity now is to take a step back, and design the entire creative workflow. In FLORA, you can connect models together to explore your creative process faster than ever before, and codify it into a creative system that can scale your ideas.

We treat models as steps in your creative process, not destinations. Creative work happens through workflows that combine models, assets, parameters, and human decision-making into repeatable systems.

There’s also much more we’re working on, including features to more easily create, reuse, and share creative systems. We’re only 35% complete in our product vision, and we’re excited to show the world what we’re shipping next.

Built for teams

We know that creative work doesn’t happen alone - you need to bring your team along.

FLORA is designed to support collaboration, reuse, and continuity at a professional level. Workflows can be shared, evolved, and handed off without losing context. Creative logic persists beyond any individual contributor.

To support adoption at scale, we have made FLORA enterprise-ready and built a team of Forward Deployed Creatives (FDCs). FDCs are AI-native creative professionals who embed directly with teams to help them augment their creative workflows with generative tools.

The new standard

Every computing paradigm produces its own creative interface. The personal computer did. Generative computing will as well.

The tools that define these moments are not the ones that chase features. They are the ones that establish new foundations.

We believe creative systems are that foundation for the generative era. We are building the environment where they can be designed, refined, and scaled.

If you want to help define the next era of creative work, we are hiring.

If your team wants generative AI with professional creative control, learn more and get in touch.

Weber Wong
Founder & CEO, FLORA