Krea Valued at $500 Million After Funding from Bain and Andreessen Horowitz

“The number one thing that sets us apart is taste,” say the co-founders of Krea, a San Francisco-based AI startup that just raised $83 million across several rounds to solve a problem many startups prefer to ignore: creative control. With a $500 million post-money valuation and backing from Bain Capital Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Abstract Ventures, Krea is building something more focused and far harder to execute.

The $83 million didn’t arrive all at once. Krea raised an initial $3 million in pre-seed and seed funding, followed by a $33 million Series A, and most recently, a $47 million Series B led by Bain. According to sources familiar with the deal, the current valuation stands at half a billion dollars.

Krea’s pitch is simple and specific: unify the flood of generative tools under one interface, built for actual creatives, with real control and real-time responsiveness. That interface isn’t just a skin for APIs. It’s built on infrastructure capable of serving massive image files, delivering live edits, and adapting instantly as new models emerge. Its users—who include professionals at Pixar, LEGO, Samsung, Loop Earplugs, and Perplexity AI—use Krea to sketch moodboards, prototype characters, generate 4K enhancements, and iterate quickly in ways that plug directly into professional pipelines.

Krea’s philosophy is clear: AI-generated content isn’t the end product but it’s just a sketch, a starting point. “Why isn’t it possible to go on an [AI-generated] image, and click and drag and drop something in or take something out?” co-founder Diego Rodriguez asks. “That’s how a painter would work.” The company’s tools are designed with that mindset: intuitive and tactile, not technical and brittle. The interface is touch-optimized, works with an iPad, and supports real-time generation that allows live color, shape, and detail modifications.

Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anish Acharya, an investor in the company, said in a statement to TechCrunch that Krea “moves at the speed of the best AI research,” while still feeling intuitive from the start. Aaref Hilaly, general partner at Bain Capital Ventures, sees Krea as an essential layer insulating creatives from the chaos of model churn. “Each model is being leapfrogged very quickly by another one,” he said. “If you’re a creator and want to use these models […] having a layer like Krea on top of all of them makes sense and that provides value to the creator.”

The company didn’t emerge from a polished pitch deck. It started with a seven-hour screen recording.

A Startup Born from a Screen Recording

Victor Perez and Diego Rodriguez met over a decade ago in Barcelona while studying audiovisual systems engineering. Perez, a former alt-rock guitarist who had considered conservatory training, and Rodriguez, with a visual arts background, both gravitated toward the creative potential of code. By 2017 or 2018, Perez became obsessed with generative adversarial networks (GANs). “You can have a synthetic brain that can understand lots of things about images,” he said. “I could create my datasets with certain color, certain shape, certain things that I liked, put it into this mini intelligence and use it as a tool to express a certain idea.”

That obsession became Geniverse, a prototype platform integrating multiple AI models for text-to-image and image-to-image generation. The Geniverse interface—at the time one of the most advanced in the space—caught the attention of HF0 (HF Zero), a selective accelerator sometimes compared to Y Combinator but far more intimate. Where YC places dozens of teams in apartments and assigns them mentors, HF0 puts a handful of founders in one house for 12 weeks and cuts out everything except work, sleep, and exercise. The founders call it “The Container.”

Rodriguez found HF0 by accident while recovering from COVID. Scrolling Twitter, he saw a post that “looked kind of scummy” and almost dismissed it. But he asked Perez to record a deep dive into the Geniverse codebase. The result was a six-to-seven-hour screen recording of Perez walking through every part of the project. Rodriguez watched it all, applied to HF0 without telling Perez, and got in. “Yo, I did this,” he later admitted on a call. “I’m not trying to steal your idea. I just wanted to practice my communication skills. But if you’re in, we can keep going and see where this leads.”

It led to Miami, then to a name change from Geniverse to Krea and now to a half-billion-dollar company building infrastructure and tools that creatives actually want to use.

A Tool, Not a Toy

Krea’s target audience includes professionals in architecture, marketing, game development, and film, but it also explicitly serves hobbyists. That’s by design. “Some people have day jobs that don’t leave time to learn Photoshop,” one founder said. “With Krea and AI, they can create something in 15 or 20 minutes. It gives them joy. It’s freedom.”

Krea treats both groups equally. Its tools are intuitive enough to onboard non-technical users, yet powerful and fast enough for professionals under deadline pressure. Perez emphasized that even experienced illustrators are now exploring ideas through video or 3D models, thanks to these tools. “It’s increasing your creative possibilities,” he said.

introducing Video Re-style.

this new tool lets you change the style of any video while keeping the original movement consistent.

learn how 👇 pic.twitter.com/GmfxazMxoN

— KREA AI (@krea_ai) April 3, 2025

The company isn’t trying to automate creativity out of the process. On the contrary, it sees AI as a new language creatives must learn, one with its own grammar, logic, and quirks. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a 3D artist for 20 years—you still need to learn how to use this as if it were a new brush,” they explained. Prompting, tuning, and editing are treated as skills, not shortcuts.

Krea’s infrastructure is built to accommodate this. Its backend supports real-time rendering, massive image files, and a rapid deployment cadence. If a new model drops, the team says they can integrate it and ship to millions of users in under a week. Users have seen the product evolve at the same pace as the research behind it.

Ultimately, what Krea sells is control; control over what models are used, how outputs are shaped, and how edits are made. The interface feels more like a design suite than a prompt window. The aesthetic is clean, minimal, but powerful, what the founders call “simple, delightful design.” That simplicity is deceptive. Underneath is a highly technical system able to scale with the industry’s most demanding tools.

And that, they argue, is what distinguishes Krea from the rest. “If you, as the founder, are still the expert at using your own tool, then something’s wrong,” they said.