TechCrunch reported on January 27th that the startup founded by former ITP student Weber Wong, Flora, has raised $42 million in Series A led by Redpoint Ventures.
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.
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.
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.
In addition, Creative Boom reported that Nike is exploring FLORA for its creative work.
When Nike recently posted a job listing for a generative AI design expert, it included an unusual requirement: "Mastery of FLORA." Not Photoshop mastery, not Midjourney expertise. FLORA, a unified creative environment that's quietly positioning itself as infrastructure for professional creative work. [...]
Weber recalls how he got in touch with Nike's team after seeing the job ad. "We built them an example workflow for their core creative process: making shoes," he explains. "It takes an initial sketch of the shoe, then runs it through a few creative steps to end up with a 360-degree turntable video of the shoe from all angles, and we can display the shoe in various angles, as still images. Then, it can take that fully rendered shoe to visualise it in various marketing campaigns, across different concepts and form factors."