Flora is a new software interface built by AI creatives for creative AI applications. Much like Apple reinvented the personal computer UI to make it feel natural for people who were not IT specialists, Flora aims to reframe the way designers and artists interact with generative AI. “AI tools make it easy to create, but lack creative control,” the startup’s founder Weber Wong says, opining that such tools have proven “great for making AI slop, but not for doing great creative work.” Wong’s goal is to make an AI interface everyone will find comfortable and intuitive, simplifying use and curating “the best text, image, and video models.”

“The model does not matter, the technology does not matter. It’s about the interface,” Wong told TechCrunch, which gives the example of “prompting Flora to create an image of a flower, then ask[ing] for details about the image, with those details leading to more prompts and varied images, each step and variation mapped out on the aforementioned canvas, which can also be shared for collaborative work with clients.”

In a manifesto to announce the company to the world, Wong wrote, “we are obsessed with building a power tool that will profoundly shape the future of creative work.” The tool he envisions is both “intuitive and powerful,” helping creatives “achieve flow state.”

Wong shares insights into the approach on a YouTube announcement touting Flora as an “intelligent canvas.”

TechCrunch reports Wong “wants Flora to be useful to any and all artists and creatives,” but is “initially focused on working with visual design agencies.”

The goal, TechCrunch says, is to allow a designer to do 100X more creative work by, say, creating a logo then quickly spinning out 100 variations. The startup is currently working with the renowned London design house Pentagram.

Wong compared Flora’s moment “to the evolution of musical composition — where Mozart ‘needed an entire orchestra to play his music,’ a musician today can get it all done ‘from his garage in New Jersey with Ableton, making it himself and posting it on SoundCloud,’” TechCrunch writes.

The startup — which at this point has no interest in building models — is, according to Analytics India Magazine backed by investors including A16Z Games, Long Journey and Menlo Ventures, as well as some of the angel investors that backed Pika, Stability AI and Midjourney.