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Andreas Blattmann and the Art of Making Images Move
He helped make image generation practical, then built a visual AI company in Freiburg. For Andreas Blattmann, the next question is what happens when pictures begin to move - and machines begin to act.
Robin Rombach Took the Long Way Home to the Future of Images
Robin Rombach helped make image generation practical, then went home to Freiburg to build the next chapter. At Black Forest Labs, his argument for open visual AI has travelled from research papers to the G7 table.
Patrick Esser and the Art of Making Images Smaller
Before an image could be conjured from a sentence, Patrick Esser helped solve a less glamorous problem: how to make the image small enough for a machine to learn. The route from a Heidelberg lab to Black Forest Labs runs through that deceptively simple idea.
Prem Akkaraju Is Building the Bridge Hollywood Said It Didn't Want
He tried to bring opening night into the living room, then helped turn movie magic into software. Now the Stability AI chief is asking an anxious creative business to help design the machine at its door.
Hikari Senju
Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco generative AI platform that creates, analyzes, and optimizes personalized ad creative at scale. A Harvard computer scientist and son of celebrated Nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju, he began building in generative AI in 2018, five years before ChatGPT made the field mainstream. His mission is to lower the cost of effective advertising so that any founder with a compelling idea can reach customers without a million-dollar budget. Omneky has raised over $13 million from investors including SoftBank and AIX Ventures, and in 2024-2025 Senju pivoted the company toward agentic AI that autonomously plans and runs campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
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.