Itzik Elbaz and the art of getting out of the way

A new employee at Artlist has an assignment that could make an experienced office worker briefly miss the safety of a spreadsheet: use the product to make something. Some form of content. The person joining the company must spend a little time being the person buying from it. Itzik Elbaz described the exercise in 2024, alongside another habit of his own: reading user feedback every day.

It is a useful place to begin with Elbaz, the company's co-founder and co-CEO. He builds tools for creative work, and asks employees to experience the work those tools are supposed to help. A welcome presentation can tell you that a company cares about its customers. An awkward afternoon trying to finish something can tell you where the buttons ought to go.

He also wrote that he meets every new employee to discuss the company's values and approach. Taken together, these are unusually concrete statements about a job often described in abstractions. Before a product becomes a strategy, someone has to use it. Before an organization can explain its mission, someone has to understand why a customer would interrupt a perfectly good day to pay for it.

A developer joins the band

Elbaz was building websites from the age of 16. He later worked at Mellanox, while music and video remained serious interests. His public LinkedIn profile lists study at the Technion from 2010 to 2014. Those strands would meet in Artlist: technical work, creative work, and the considerable inconvenience of getting the two to cooperate.

The business began in 2016 in Kibbutz Afikim, in northern Israel. Ira Belsky, a filmmaker and Elbaz's friend from their military service, wanted a simpler way to license music. Musicians Assaf Ayalon and Eyal Raz joined the effort. Elbaz was recruited to build the website. The founding group had a problem to solve before it had much interest in startup vocabulary.

That combination matters. A filmmaker brought the frustration, musicians brought knowledge of the material, and a developer made a service people could use. The original proposition was a subscription music catalog. The novelty lay partly in the permission surrounding the music: a creator could spend more attention on a film and less on the administrative adventure of securing its soundtrack.

There is an actual music credit

Elbaz's connection to music has a pleasingly checkable detail. Artlist's catalog lists Couture, an electronic production duo comprising Elbaz and fellow co-founder Eyal Raz. Among the titles are “Special Delivery,” “Mission Life,” and “Let the World Explode.” The last is a fairly forceful name for something available in a licensing catalog. Even a subscription service deserves a dramatic afternoon.

The catalog also carries alternative versions, including instrumental and stripped arrangements. It is a small reminder that music made for a picture has practical lives beyond its first recording. An editor may need room for dialogue. A vocal may be exactly right until the voiceover arrives. A track can work beautifully and still need another version.

Couture gives the profile a second point of entry. Elbaz helps run the platform, and his name also appears among the people making music inside it. That does not make every business decision an artistic one. It does give his interest in the creator's working experience a tangible accompaniment. There are songs to play, alongside the product announcements.

The catalog gets restless

Artlist expanded beyond its original music offering. Artgrid, its footage service, launched in April 2019; a sound-effects library followed in 2020. In June of that year, the company announced $48 million in financing led by KKR, with existing investor Elephant Partners participating. Elephant had already invested in 2018.

Elbaz's comments on the financing emphasized what KKR could bring beyond money: its experience in technology and media, its network, and investments in businesses such as Fotolia and BMG Rights Management. The company's stated plan was to broaden its catalogs and add features and assets. A customer making a video would need more than a song.

The expansion also went through software. In 2021, Elbaz publicly welcomed the FXhome team and described a shared ambition to help people tell stories through video. His later announcement for Artlist Max brought together the names Artlist, Artgrid, Motion Array, and FXhome. By then, the separate pieces were being presented as parts of one working environment.

In a 2023 podcast appearance, he described Artlist as a place to create, with the customer at its center. Music could be the beginning; the next requirement might be footage or something else. Read against the company's acquisitions and launches, that is a practical definition of expansion: follow the project across the desk.

A little room for the individual

The working environment also occupies Elbaz as a writer. In February 2025, he argued for a company culture that leaves room for individual preferences. His examples were almost stubbornly ordinary: clothing, work tools, different activities at company events, and employee-led projects. Basketball teams and singing groups appeared in the same discussion.

These are revealing choices of scale. He was writing about how a person experiences a workplace, down to whether the available equipment suits the task. A culture can be proclaimed in enormous lettering and experienced through a very small daily irritation. His argument was that making space for different people helps them contribute different ideas.

That is an expressed management philosophy, rather than a guarantee about everybody's experience. Still, it belongs beside the content-making exercise. In both, he tries to connect an organizational claim to something a person actually does. The employee gets a choice. The new hire makes a piece of content. The grand noun has to survive an ordinary verb.

“AI handles the how, freeing us to focus on the what.”

Itzik Elbaz · Artlist AI Trend Report 2026

Two tests before the launch

By May 2025, the question had become how Artlist would handle generative AI. Elbaz described two tests for new offerings: the quality of the output and the licensing needed for commercial use. He put the quality ambition in the language of a very visible advertising slot: a Super Bowl commercial.

The pairing is consistent with the original business. An attractive asset and the ability to use it belong in the same conversation. An image might look convincing on a screen; a professional creator still needs to decide whether it fits a paid assignment. Elbaz discussed artistic and technological evaluation together, rather than treating a model's existence as sufficient reason to release a product.

In January 2026, he announced an AI roadmap at a New York event: the AI Toolkit, an image-generation model called Artlist Original 1.0, and the forthcoming Artlist Studio. Artlist ended 2025 with company-reported annual recurring revenue of $260 million, up 50% year over year. The catalog business had acquired a much larger set of moving parts.

The company's 2026 trend report included a compact Elbaz formulation: “AI handles the how, freeing us to focus on the what.” It is an ambition for the division of labor. The interesting part is what happens when the person using the software has a very specific “what” in mind.

The director still wants a say

Artlist Studio launched on April 20, 2026. The company described a production environment with choices about casting, locations, and camera angles, organized around building a film shot by shot. At launch, it also announced $300 million in annual recurring revenue and 600% growth in new users in the first quarter compared with the first quarter of 2025.

Elbaz's own launch message emphasized direction. A creator wants to shape a result, rather than simply collect a stream of generated assets. That distinction helps explain why Studio borrowed the vocabulary of a shoot. A camera angle is a decision with consequences for a scene. Consistency between shots is part of whether a sequence works at all.

The product's proposed workflow puts those decisions in familiar places. Choose a character, choose a location, adjust the camera, return to the scene. Its promise is control across a production. Whether that promise holds is something creators can test in their own projects, which brings the story rather neatly back to the assignment given to new employees.

The change reaches his own desk

The AI shift also carried a substantial cost inside Artlist. In June 2026, the company announced a restructuring involving approximately 200 of its roughly 500 employees. It said the aim was a flatter, faster organization built around AI, and that affected employees had been invited to hearings. The growth figures and the employment decision belong in the same account.

Six days before that announcement, Elbaz published an argument about rebuilding companies for AI. He favored teams organized around products, with enough capability to take an idea through to release, supported by shared infrastructure. The organizational design was part of his technology argument: new tools would achieve less if old coordination problems remained.

By August, he and Belsky were discussing the transition together on a podcast. Their co-CEO arrangement had endured for a decade. The conversation returned to the company changing quickly, and to the need for Elbaz himself to change with it. The developer who joined a music-licensing project now had to help remake the organization it had become.

There is a demanding continuity here. Elbaz keeps returning to the space between an intention and its execution: finding usable music, finishing a video, getting a team to ship, directing an AI-generated scene. His next chapter will be judged in that space, by the people doing the work. They have a film to finish. The software ought to help them get on with it.