OpenArt

OpenArt was founded in 2022 by Coco Mao and John Qiao. The two had previously built products together at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s Area 120 incubator, where they launched a short-form video platform, grew it to millions of monthly active users with a team of five and saw it acquired by Google Search.⁠[1][2]

Noticing that many people generating AI images did not know what prompts to write, the two first built a browsing site that paired AI images with their prompts and posted it to Hacker News as “Pinterest for AI images,” where it became the day’s top story. OpenArt then moved into image generation and editing tools; because users most often asked for consistent characters so they could tell stories, the platform expanded into video, character and audio tools.⁠[2]

OpenArt says that in 2025 its annual recurring revenue grew sevenfold, from $10.5 million to more than $70 million, and that it passed 8 million monthly active users.⁠[2][3]

In the first quarter of 2026 OpenArt overhauled its product interface, hosted the first AI Influencer Summit in San Francisco and produced Bot House, which it describes as the first AI reality TV show.⁠[2]

On January 30, 2026, the venture firm Canaan announced that it had led OpenArt’s $30 million Series A, with participation from Basis Set Ventures and DCM; OpenArt then had about 20 employees, with Coco Mao as chief executive officer. In a March 2026 company article, OpenArt put the Canaan Partners-led Series A at $35 million.⁠[3][2]

Laura Chau of Canaan wrote: “OpenArt treats creators as owners, not inputs.”⁠[3]

OpenArt describes itself as “The AI Creative Platform For Every Storyteller” and brings models from Google, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, Kling, Seedance and Flux into one workspace. The company states that it is independent and not owned by OpenAI.⁠[1]

As of November 2026 OpenArt’s products included OpenArt Director, which turns an idea into a multi-scene video with modes such as Short Film, Music Video, UGC Ads and Micro Drama; video generation, motion control, image generation, camera angle control and image upscaling; Character Builder and 3D World; OpenArt MCP and CLI for use inside AI agents such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor; an Adobe After EffectsAdobe After EffectsAdobe After Effects is Adobe’s desktop software for motion graphics, compositing and visual effects. It was developed by CoSA, a start-up in Providence, Rhode Island, which released version 1.0 in January 1993; it became an Adobe product after Aldus acquired CoSA and Aldus merged into Adobe, and in 2019 its principal developers received a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Open the full entry plugin; and Arena, a leaderboard ranking AI models by creative task. The company reports more than 10 million creators, more than 100 AI models and more than 700 million generations.⁠[1]

OpenArt: Official website: https://openart.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/openart_ai (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openart-ai (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@openart_ai (opens in a new window).⁠[1]