Platform “turns your thoughts into things”, allows anyone, with a few words or an image, to instantly create priced physical products for fun, sharing, purchase or sale
Founded by Mariam Naficy – founder of Minted – Arcade is backed by investors that include Reid Hoffman, Offline Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Heretic Ventures
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Arcade, a generative AI marketplace where what can be dreamed can be made, was announced publicly and opened its doors in beta. The platform, a place for self-expression, social discovery, and shopping, will launch initially with jewelry and will expand to other categories later this year.
Arcade allows consumers to define and share their design identity by creating their own AI-generated products across a variety of categories. Through Arcade’s technology and network of makers, users’ designs can be immediately purchased and handmade in a quantity of one.
On Arcade, anyone can create a product by typing just a few words or uploading an image. Each product has an image, price, materials and dimensions – all generated via the company’s AI technologies. These designs can be immediately purchased and translated into physical form by a maker – an artisan, brand, or manufacturer in Arcade’s global marketplace – or simply collected and shared as a new form of design-forward social content. Arcade aims to make it as easy for consumers to express themselves with a product creation as it is to share a photo or a written post. Users can also promote their creations, earning a percentage of every sale.
Arcade is co-founded by Mariam Naficy with the team from her incubator, Heretic Ventures, focused on launching new businesses in the consumer AI space. Naficy, pioneer of the creator economy and founder of Minted, has transformed how products are created, sold and purchased online. In 1998, she co-founded Eve.com, the first online cosmetics retailer. With Minted, she launched one of the earliest and most widely adopted crowdsourcing and creator economy platforms.
“If you’ve ever had a vision for a product, now is the moment to bring it to life,” said Naficy. “Arcade’s AI blurs the line between dream and reality, between content and commerce – paving the way for new forms of personal expression to take shape. As the power of definition shifts to the individual, the era of limitless assortment and the ‘anything store’ has begun.”
A New Space for Imagination, Sharing, and Discovery
Arcade’s experience blends content, community, and commerce. It starts as a creation experience, where users can design products, and extends into a space for self-expression, social validation, and visual discovery. Users can share their creations to express their design ‘identity’, and browse and purchase products created by friends as well as their favorite creators and tastemakers. Anyone who has created a product design has the ability to instantly share their creations and open a simple storefront with a single click. Users can also create Arcade ‘Dreamboards’ to curate and share collections of their favorite items, including those created by others.
This provides an entirely new platform for creators and tastemakers to engage with their fans in a unique way, combining shopping and community – showcasing their own creations, or the product designs of friends, fans, and family.
Arcade Investors
Arcade has raised $17M in total funding, including a first round investment of $5 million, co-led by Reid Hoffman and Brit Morin of Offline Ventures and with Heretic Ventures participating, and an additional round of investment of $5 million, led by Ashton Kutcher of Sound Ventures.
“Arcade is the most broadly relevant consumer AI experience I’ve seen,” said Hoffman. “Mariam has a track record of building creator marketplaces that consumers love – and by using its distinctive AI technologies, Arcade will reinvent human expression as we know it.”
“Arcade’s multi-sided marketplace enables a new generation of creators to build businesses simply by turning their ideas into sellable products,” said Morin. “The platform combines the power of generative AI with a global community of artisans and makers — fueling a new generation of digital storefronts and entrepreneurial growth on a global scale. The possibilities of where this could go are endless.”
“Arcade gives people the power to manifest what they dream,” said Kutcher. “It brings democratization to creation, allowing self-expression and visual discovery that is both social and entertaining. Sound Ventures is excited to partner with Mariam and the Arcade team to enable consumers to go from prompt to product.”
Additional investors include:
- Alexa von Tobel, Founder and Managing Partner, Inspired Capital
- Colin Kaepernick, founder of Lumi, investor and former NFL quarterback
- Christy Turlington Burns, founder and CEO of Every Mother Counts
- David Luan, CEO of Adept AI Labs, former tech lead of large models effort at Google, and former VP of engineering at OpenAI
- Elad Gil, entrepreneur and investor
- Ev Williams, CEO and co-founder at A Medium Corp., and co-founder of Twitter
- Jeff Wilke, former CEO, Worldwide Consumer at Amazon
- Karlie Kloss, entrepreneur and philanthropist
- Sharon Zhou, co-founder and CEO, Lamini, CS faculty at Stanford
How Arcade’s Platform Works
Arcade has built and vetted a global community of high quality manufacturers to produce consumers’ creations on demand, in a quantity of one. Arcade’s process and systems allow makers around the world to apply to be part of the marketplace, and for the company to quickly vet and onboard makers, building each maker their own unique model that is trained with an understanding of their individual capabilities and specialties. Arcade is committed to supporting the creativity of independent makers, and will ensure that each maker’s data and model remains independent from others in the network.
With the Arcade website, anyone can create new products by typing just a few words about their desired item. A constellation of AI models generates a unique product from a maker’s model, including a photorealistic image, pricing, dimensions, and a description of product materials. When a customer purchases a product, the product image and details are sent to the maker to produce.
Consumers can preview the beta experience and create their own jewelry designs on Arcade by visiting https://arcade.ai. Makers interested in joining the platform can apply at: https://arcade.ai/makers. Brands and individuals interested in using Arcade to create and monetize product lines featuring their personal design identities can learn more at: https://www.arcade.ai/sell.
About Arcade
Arcade is the world’s first AI product creation platform, enabling anyone to design, purchase, and sell custom, manufacturable products with a simple text or image prompt. Co-founded by Mariam Naficy, Arcade brings together the power of generative AI with a global network of top artisans to turn user ideas into personalized, physical products in a quantity of one. Arcade aims to redefine commerce by offering unprecedented personal choice, expression, and meaning in product creation.
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