Flora, a creative AI startup, has raised $42 million in a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures to tackle what it says is a big headache for brands and agencies– fragmented generative AI tools.
Founded in 2024, the platform hosts a suite of text, image, and video AI tools in a single environment and aimed at professional creatives, CEO Weber Wong told ADWEEK. Its users include Nike, Levi’s, AKQA, Red Antler, Lionsgate, and Pentagram, according to its funding pitch deck obtained by ADWEEK.
“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,” Wong said. “No one was building for the professional creative class and they were getting left behind.”
Flora’s AI is primarily used in the early phases of campaigns—testing concepts and ad ideas—before scaling into full brand executions, like visualizing a product across multiple out-of-home placements. It hosts myriads of latest generative AI tools, including Google’s Nano Banana, Runway, Kling, and OpenAI’s AI tools, per the pitch deck.
Wong says the creative industry hasn’t seen “real innovation” since Adobe launched its Premiere editing suite in 1991. “I set out to build essentially the next Adobe,” he told ADWEEK. “You can take a given product, see it in 10 different global campaigns, see it in every different aspect ratio of the mobile landscape–all these different things at once.”
Since the advent of generative AI in 2022, the market has been flooded with creative tools—from startups like Higgsfield to established players like Adobe, which recently amped up its offerings with updates to its Firefly product.
Flora, which currently has 25 employees, plans to use the funding towards hiring engineers and expanding its sales and marketing effort.
The round also drew participation from tech and creative leaders, including the CEOs of Vercel and Frame.io, as well as the co-founders of Fal, joining existing investors like a16z Games, Menlo Ventures, and Twitch founder Justin Kan.
Check out the pitch deck below.
