The Paintbrush Belongs to Everyone: The OpenArt Story

The Lore

By the time Coco Mao and John Qiao left Google in 2022 to build OpenArt, they had already done this once before. Inside Google's Area 120 incubator they had launched a short-form video platform, grown it to millions of monthly active users with a team of five, and watched it get acquired by Google Search. They knew what a lean team could do.

So when they noticed people were generating AI images everywhere but had no idea what prompts to write, they built a simple browsing site pairing AI images with their prompts, a place where anyone could see exactly how something was made and make it themselves. They posted it to Hacker News under the headline "Pinterest for AI images" and woke up to find it was the number one story of the day.

From there they started building creation tools, going deeper on image generation and editing. But the signal that changed everything came from their users. The most requested feature, by far, was consistent characters. When Coco asked why, the answer was always the same: they were trying to tell a story. That insight is what turned OpenArt from an image tool into a full creative platform — image, video, character, audio, all in one place — built for the people who have a story to tell, not just an image to generate.

The Momentum

A team of ten people building something they believed in looked up one day and realized what they'd created was undeniable. In 2025, OpenArt grew revenue 7x, from $10.5M ARR to over $70M. We crossed 8 million monthly active users and closed a $35M Series A led by Canaan Partners.

But the metric we actually watch most closely isn't ARR, it's how obsessively our creators keep coming back. Not to generate one-off images, but to deepen the characters they've built, expand the universes they're creating, and advance stories that matter to them. That retention is the real signal.

Behind those numbers is a team headquartered in San Francisco, building for millions of OpenArt creators in every country on every continent. We move fast, over-communicate, and put storytelling at the heart of everything we build. We've nearly doubled in size this year, and the pace isn't slowing down. In Q1 alone, we've already:

• Launched a foundational UI overhaul, the cleanest workflows we've ever shipped
• Hosted the world's first AI Influencer Summit in San Francisco
• Produced Bot House, the first ever AI reality TV show

We're actively growing the team to match. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to build, we'd love to hear from you.

What We Believe

The paintbrush was radical when it arrived. So was the camera. So was cinema. So was CGI. Every generation has had a moment where a new tool showed up and a certain kind of person, usually dismissed as naive or dangerous or both, picked it up and made something the world had never seen. The artists and storytellers who embraced those tools didn't replace creativity, they just became the next chapter of it.

Generative AI is that moment. When we say we're democratizing creativity at OpenArt, what we mean is putting the paintbrush in the hands of someone who has never held one. We believe AI helps humans tell better stories. For seasoned filmmakers, or just someone with a story to share.

Among the creators Coco spoke to last year was a recently retired grandmother in New Zealand who had built a YouTube channel entirely out of AI cat stories. Every week she types a prompt, OpenArt builds the world around it, and her small but loyal audience comes back for more. She isn't a filmmaker or a designer, just someone who finally had the tools to match her imagination.

What's Next

The next great creative franchise could come from anywhere. A filmmaker with a vision too expensive to shoot. A brand builder who can't wait for a production cycle. A first-time creator who, for the first time, actually can.

That's what we're building toward. A platform where your characters, your aesthetic, and your creative identity belong entirely to you. Where IP you create with AI is yours to protect, to grow, and to own. Where the tools are powerful enough for professionals and accessible enough for everyone else.