Víctor Pérez

The One-Day Dropout Who Outbuilt Everyone

Some people need a semester at a top graduate program to figure out what they want to do. Víctor Pérez needed one day. He arrived at Cornell University in early 2022 armed with one of Spain's most competitive fellowships - the laCaixa grant, awarded annually to a handful of the country's top students by the King of Spain himself. Then he called Diego Rodriguez and said, essentially: forget the PhD, let's build this thing.

That thing became Krea.ai. By April 2025, it had raised $83 million, crossed 20 million users, and landed on Fast Company's list of the most innovative companies in the world. Pixar's creative teams use it. So does LEGO. Samsung. Coca-Cola. Perplexity.

The story starts not in Silicon Valley but on the streets of Barcelona, where Pérez grew up obsessed with graffiti art and graphic design. He studied Audiovisual Systems Engineering at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where he met Diego Rodriguez - a fellow creator who would eventually become Krea's CTO. The two shared an interest in what computers could do for artists, long before "generative AI" became a boardroom phrase.

After graduating, Pérez spent two years as Head of Machine Learning Research at Plyzer Intelligence in Barcelona, building graph neural networks and knowledge graphs for e-commerce. Then he moved to the Bay Area, worked as a machine learning engineer, built prosepainter.com - one of the first browser-based AI creative tools - published "Sculpting with Words" at NeurIPS, and co-authored a paper at ICCV. He also collaborated with luxury brand CHANEL on CLIP and GANs for fashion, work that ended up being cited in an Adobe Research paper (StyleCLIP). Not a typical path.

The Recurse Center - a selective hacker residency in New York - was next. Then the laCaixa fellowship to Cornell. Then one day. Then Krea.

The Dinner Party That Launched a Platform

The specific moment Krea became real happened not at a pitch meeting but at a dinner party. Pérez had been watching the release of the Latent Consistency Model - a new approach to image generation that made real-time synthesis suddenly feasible. He built a live demonstration on the spot: a camera capturing the room, AI transforming the feed into stylized visuals in milliseconds. The guests were watching the future happen in real time.

That demo became the foundation for Krea's signature feature: a real-time AI canvas where artists can sketch, adjust, and generate without waiting for renders. Move a shape in the interface and the entire generated image shifts around it. Point a live camera at something and watch it become a painting.

Before the dinner party demo, there were the AI spirals - viral mini-apps Pérez posted on Twitter that turned images into swirling generative loops. They spread. People shared them. The sharing turned into a waitlist of over 400,000 people. That waitlist turned into a pre-seed round in June 2022. That pre-seed round turned into $3M from Pebblebed, then $33M from Andreessen Horowitz, then $47M from Bain Capital Ventures. Three rounds. Three years. $500M.

The Philosophy: Amplify, Don't Replace

The companies competing in generative AI mostly pitch replacement: give us a text prompt, we give you finished content. Pérez has a different framing. He draws a line from Figma to Canva - platforms that didn't just digitize existing design work, but invented new categories of designer (UX designers, social media designers) who didn't exist before. AI, in his view, is doing the same thing: not replacing painters, but creating "a new creative who looks more like an AI researcher than a painter."

Krea is built around that insight. The platform doesn't ask users to type prompts into a void. It gives them interactive tools - sliders, canvas elements, live video feeds, custom trained models - so that AI becomes a responsive material to work with, not a black box that spits out results. The product ships new features every Thursday. The team includes musicians, poets, photographers, and graffiti artists who also happen to be good at computers - a cultural posture that's deliberate.

Enterprise adoption backed the thesis: Pixar uses Krea for visual development. LEGO uses it for product visualization. Samsung for marketing content. These aren't hobbyists playing with AI - they're professional creative teams choosing Krea over alternatives because the output stays under human control.

The Research Behind the Startup

It's easy to underestimate how unusual Pérez's technical background is for a CEO. Most founders at his company's stage are operators scaling systems. Pérez is a published AI researcher who worked on generative models before most investors knew what a GAN was. His collaboration with CHANEL came years before AI-generated fashion became a trend. His paper at NeurIPS ("Sculpting with Words") explored using language to shape generative visual output - the conceptual ancestor of what every text-to-image tool does now. He was early. He built things. Then he built a company around them.

At ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Real-Time Live! - one of the most important venues for real-time graphics and interactive technology - Krea presented as part of the official program. The company that started with AI spirals on Twitter had become a fixture of the serious research conference circuit.