Victor Perez and Diego Rodriguez met as undergraduates in Barcelona in the early 2010s, studying audiovisual systems engineering. Diego introduced Victor to coding and generative adversarial networks, and Victor spent the next six years working on generative models, including early work on ArtBreeder.

Dropping a Royal Scholarship

After graduation, both were awarded full scholarships by the King of Spain to attend Cornell University. Victor stayed at Cornell for exactly one day — he was already dreaming up what would become Krea. The pair dropped their postgrad grants to build the startup instead.

The Accidental Application

Diego applied to HF0 (a residency program billed as "YC for technical founders") using Victor's concept — without telling him. When HF0 called Diego to Miami for a final interview, he confessed what he'd done. Victor told him to "sell the f*ck out of this sh*t." Less than 72 hours later, both were in Miami. Despite a poor interview, they got the offer. They founded Krea in March 2022.

The $10K Localhost Demo

The breakthrough product moment came when Victor hacked together a real-time AI canvas demo at a dinner party using a Latent Consistency Model. When the team posted this demo on Twitter (running on localhost), people assumed it was live and started subscribing immediately — they made $10,000 in subscriptions in under 24 hours before the product was even publicly available.

20M Users, 8 People, One Living Room

By April 2025, Krea had grown to over 20 million users entirely organically, 20x'd their revenue, and raised $83M at a $500M valuation — all with a team of just 8 people working out of a living room in San Francisco. Their customer list includes Pixar, LEGO, Samsung, and Perplexity.

• Founded: March 2022 (HF0 residency)
• $10K in 24 hours: From a localhost demo posted on Twitter
• Users: 20M+ (all organic)
• Revenue: 20x growth in 14 months, $8M ARR (April 2025)
• Team: 8 people (living room office)
• Funding: $83M total ($47M Series B from Bain Capital)
• Valuation: $500M
• Clients: Pixar, LEGO, Samsung, Perplexity