San Francisco – Poly, a web-first generative AI company for design assets, announced today the close of its $4M Seed, led by Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, and NextView Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, and other strategic angels. The new capital will be used to train vertically finetuned generative AI models and attract talent in the design and AI space, furthering Poly’s vision to create an “infinite” design asset library.
Founded by Stanford design and AI alumni, Abhay Agarwal and Sam Young, Poly was built to make the current manual process of creating and collecting design assets more accessible. It allows designers to generate stunning, highly customizable, HD design assets with a single text prompt in seconds. Since releasing its first web-based texture generation tool in the summer, Poly has attracted thousands of active users and hundreds of paying subscribers to its platform, with over 2 million user-generated textures. Poly’s current customers range from professionals at fortune 500 companies to individual freelancers in game design, AR/VR, interior design, architecture, and 3D rendering for e-commerce, marketing, and many more.
“Generative AI has become a startup buzzword recently, especially after the open-source launch of Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion” notes Poly’s CEO and co-founder Abhay Agarwal. “However, we have hard-won insight from years of launching generative AI products.” Agarwal is behind a number of such tools, including Beat Sage (an AI for creating Beat Saber maps), Dream Machine (an ambient audio generator), and Lyrical Surgeon (an AI-assisted lyrics-writing tool).
While having launched with an initial texture generation tool, Poly plans to quickly expand into generating illustrations, icons, graphics, sprites, sound effects, and many other design asset types and modalities. The ultimate vision for Poly is to become an online personal asset library, with limitless supplies of highly customized design assets that match every designer’s unique styles and color schemes. Poly is a web-first platform with plug-in integrations with all major design platforms in the future to enable a seamless experience for designers.
With this seed round, Poly plans to continue its relentless focus on its proprietary generative AI innovation, model training, and product development to support more types of design assets and be embedded in designers’ daily workflows. With a significant portion of the funding allocated to training new generative AI models, Poly also plans to augment its current team with the addition of several additional founding engineers.
“We want to build a tool that designers love and will use for their workflows. While many other generative AI applications are fun and inspiring, we think real sustained adoption comes from being a part of one’s design routine,” said Agarwal. “Poly wants to augment the current creative process with better design assets instead of replacing them. To achieve our vision, we believe in building the best possible technology since a higher quality product is required to stand out and win in this emerging and highly active space.”
“We are super excited to be investing in Poly and partnering with the team to bring generative AI to designers,” said Ryan Isono, Deal Partner at Felicis. “Poly’s team has a unique mix of design, AI, and operating experience. They have demonstrated their deep understanding of customer needs and their ability to execute their vision. Poly’s generative AI technology is automating what was once a painful manual process and solving real problems for designers of all types. We believe designers will love this tool and it will become a meaningful part of their workflow.”
Poly was founded in 2022 and participated in Y Combinator’s S22 cohort. Poly is actively hiring.
