ai-art
(4)
Spellbrush
Spellbrush is a San Francisco generative AI studio building anime games and AI tools for artists. The team behind niji・journey - the anime model co-developed with Midjourney - and games like Arrowmancer, Cake Duel, and Waifu Labs. A Y Combinator W18 alum led by Cory Li, focused on using deep learning to help human artists create high-quality anime visuals.
Raj Gajwani
Raj Gajwani is Chief Business Officer at OpenArt AI, the San Francisco generative-AI creator suite for images and video. Before OpenArt he spent over a decade at Google, scaling DoubleClick's channel program to $1.3 billion in revenue and founding Orion Wifi, one of the most successful projects out of Google's Area 120 incubator (now part of Android). He also runs Day 0, an enterprise AI strategy consultancy, and serves as a board member, advisor, and angel investor across startups including Couchsurfing, MultiView, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance. A Harvard graduate who also studied at the London School of Economics, he sits at the intersection of frontier AI products and enterprise go-to-market.
Coco Mao
Coco Mao is the CEO and co-founder of OpenArt AI, the creative platform that grew from a viral Hacker News post about AI image prompts to $70M+ ARR with just 20 people. A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who spent seven years at Google building search products and the Tangi short-form video app, she left in 2022 to co-found OpenArt with CTO John Qiao. Under her leadership, OpenArt scaled 7x in 2025, reached 8 million monthly active users, raised a $30M Series A from Canaan Partners, and launched One-Click Story — a feature that lets anyone turn a single sentence into a complete video with persistent characters.
Cory Li
Cory Li is the CEO and co-founder of Spellbrush, the San Francisco-based generative AI studio behind niji-journey - the world's leading AI anime art platform built in collaboration with Midjourney. A MIT-trained bioengineer turned AI entrepreneur, Li previously co-founded Benchling (YC S12), the biotech R&D platform that went on to become a unicorn. At Spellbrush (YC W18), he leads a 31-person team building AI-powered anime games and creative tools - from WaifuLabs' anime portrait generator to Arrowmancer, an anime RPG where players design characters using generative AI, to niji-journey's mobile app with millions of users.