This Founder Turned An Art Project Into A Slop-Free AI Canvas For Creatives
Weber Wong co-founded FLORA as an interface for creatives to leverage the best of AI models in their work. He's now raised $6.5 million -- and some designers are noticing.
The Upshot
Weber Wong might be the only startup founder whose career journey took him from venture capital to art school.
But after two years investing at Menlo Ventures, Wong’s next move wasn’t immediately an AI startup, but a coffee shop, where he worked while trying to embed himself in the local arts scene. “I hit my quarter-life crisis,” jokes Wong, 26.
Tech wasn’t done with Wong. When he heard about a graduate art program at NYU that had helped launch one of his favorite AI startups, Runway, Wong jumped on a chance to join. And the projects he worked on in that program have become FLORA, a startup that helps creatives to use AI tools.
Launched publicly in February, FLORA has already reached hundreds of thousands of signups within the past three months. FLORA’s digital canvas for iterating on creative assets already counts branding agencies like Gretel, creative studios like Nemesis Global and art collectives like Studio Halia as customers.
And Wong’s startup has proven popular with the venture capitalists whose career he previously rejected. FLORA has raised $6.5 million in funding from veteran AI investor Mike Volpi at Hanabi Capital, Wong’s former firm Menlo Ventures, Long Journey, a16z speedrun, Company Ventures and a wide range of angel investors including Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and Gabe Whaley, founder of artist collective MSCHF.
Creatives might have good reason to distrust an AI company promising to automate away the processes they run on behalf of colleagues or clients. And Wong doesn’t dispute that the arts and design are currently flooded with low-effort creations he calls “AI slop.”
But Wong is hoping that FLORA can prove a boost to high-quality work, not a threat. “Current AI tools are built by non-creatives, for other non-creatives to feel creative,” Wong tells Upstarts. “We help you speak your idea into existence, with a high degree of creative control.”
Succeed, and Wong could build FLORA into a tool that entrenches itself in the concept phase of a design process. There’s another scenario where FLORA and other startups tackling creative tools — and it’s far from the only looking at this market — simply seed a new category for Adobe, the 800-pound gorilla in creative software, to also gobble up.
But FLORA’s launch story is already notable for founders for its approach to building alongside an industry that might otherwise resist the adoption of AI tools. How far can empathy and street cred take a founder? And what are designers saying so far? More on that below.
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The interface
Runway, the AI software maker for video creation, had been one of the last startups that impressed Wong while a VC. When he founded out that CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela had helped devise it as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the NYU Tisch School for the Arts, Wong decided to attend ITP himself.
That led to experiments like one that connected a webcam to an image generation model, which would then reflect back the real-world environment in a prompted artistic style. Wong met Kan, the Twitch co-founder, after another where he attached a GoPro to his head to stream his own field of view.
His next step was to open up the webcams for other students and art friends to play with AI outputs — and sticker shock. “People started using it, and it started costing me money. I was like, ‘I need to do something about this,’” he deadpans.
So Wong teamed up wIth Alex Li, a former high school friend helping with these projects, to build a business around their work. They considered adding a services or consulting business, but soon focused on a bigger opportunity to build AI tools for the creative class.
Their insight: FLORA didn’t need to spend many millions of dollars training its own model, or attempting to fine-tune other models faster than the field. Instead, FLORA would be the interface that artists and designers could use to access all of those models interchangeably. “There’s a misconception that models are creative tools, but they’re just technologies,” says Wong.
FLORA’s infinite canvas and go-to market approach emulate software maker Figma; in trying to build a more in-depth product on top of other AI models, it’s taking a similar approaching to Harvey AI in law. In place of law firms, FLORA is looking to work with brand teams, film production studios, marketing agencies and game design shops.
Volpi, FLORA’s lead investor, says the company stands out for its “foot in both worlds” between the technical AI builders and domain experts that its tools serve. That’s less common among AI shops than one might expect, he adds. “Weber’s secret sauce is that he really gets it as a member of the community that benefits from his product,” Volpi says.
In one nod to that customer, FLORA recently sprinted to release a team workspace capability for businesses to manage every employee’s workflow and to set permissions company-wide; the company is also looking to offer different frameworks for building projects beyond its digital canvas, though Wong is vague about details.
Friend or foe
Wong sees himself, and FLORA, as good actors helping with design work that is less glamorous than it might sound. Every employee — the company is currently hiring — is expected to be proficient in at least three image generation models before FLORA, and ideally have worked on at least one.
The startup also aims to maintain a moral high ground by confirming with model providers that they don’t train on intellectual property of FLORA customers.
“We want to be really rock solid there, and ensure that the professional creative teams we work with don’t have anything to worry about,” Wong says.
The designer community, meanwhile, has mixed feelings about AI, several practitioners say. “It’s a tricky topic,” says one designer source who Upstarts granted anonymity to speak freely. Those closer to the arts might see AI tools as stealing their styles, while those in more traditional graphic design shops are already used to using software tools to speed up their work.
“I am kind of in between. I think a lot of it depends on how the data is being used and copyright issues,” they add. (Visual Electric, the image generator they cite as seemingly most trustworthy here, is not part of FLORA’s model lineup.)
At agency Pentagram, designer Catherine Chung supports a partner across the entire project pipeline from concepts to deliverables. She didn’t think much about AI before using FLORA, she says, but now uses it to replace tedious work like testing 500 different versions of a specific letter for a brand name.
“A client might see three, four or five concepts in a presentation, but in the designer’s Adobe Illustrator file, it’s going to be a chaos tornado,” she says. Chung also finds FLORA useful for connecting two ideas in conceptual visuals, as a way to get her thought process rolling.
Cory Dobbin, the founder of programmatic advertising agency OTHERSIDE, sees a tool like FLORA as potentially saving tens of thousands of dollars spent on cutting assets into video ads. Dobbin was already stitching together AI tools himself, including custom GPTs from OpenAI, when he discovered FLORA on X.
Clients are mostly optimistic about using such tools to save money, especially in the face of challenges like tariffs, he says. “You have to save every dollar you can. A few of them are nervous, because of the way that AI is perceived by the public at not the same level of optimism.”
But Riley Jones, a graphic web designer working with a no-code startup on their design team, says he’ll still use Anthropic’s model Claude to generate initial text, then get image variations in Midjourney, which he says is faster. FLORA is his place for “riffing off of a solid idea,” he says – but one that can prove costly if one riffs too much.
None of the designers – mostly power users who have shared past feedback with FLORA – seem overly concerned about AI eliminating their jobs anytime soon. “It creates a very even entry point, but with a high ceiling,” says Dobbin. “If you’re a crappy designer, it’s going to keep you crappy,” agrees Chung.
At FLORA, Wong says it isn’t his job to convince anyone to change their positions on using AI. “I don’t think it’s our place,” he says. “Our job is to make using AI good and pleasurable for creatives.”
That said, he’s got a one-liner ready: “If you work with a top design agency, you’re not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars because they know how to use Adobe Illustrator.”