Moda raises $7.5M from General Catalyst to build AI design agent with fully editable canvas — not 'AI slop'

Speaker 1: And let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

Speaker 2: Up next, we have Moda. Moda, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: How are you doing?

Speaker 2: What's going on? Good to meet you.

Speaker 8: Hi. I'm good. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1: Thanks for joining. Huge week for you.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Walk us through the the company and the launch. Yes.

Speaker 8: Yes. I'm very sleep deprived right now, so apologize for that. Yeah. So I'm Anvisha. I'm the founder and CEO of Moda. Moda is an AI design tool for non designers. Mhmm. People use our AI design agent

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 8: To create slides, social graphics, like all kinds of landing page mock ups, everything. The difference between us and other stuff is we've created it on a fully editable canvas. So it's not giving you back, like a static image that you can't edit. It's like truly drawing shapes. You can click and edit a text box. You can move things around, etcetera. We just announced our 7 and a half million dollar funding round led by General Catalyst with

Speaker 2: General General Catalyst and?

Speaker 8: Pear, the founder of Dropbox. He used to work at Dropbox. So that one's really special to me to have Arash on board.

Speaker 2: Let's go. Yeah. Let's Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you came out with a somewhat of a controversial launch. You're the anti SLOP company. Yeah. People control over their outputs. Mhmm. Take SLOP might come out, but then you can you can change it and adapt it, improve it. Yet, talk about how the launch has gone.

Speaker 1: What been reasons? The pigs at the trough. Some of us like slop.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Some of us do.

Speaker 8: If slop is what you want, you can you can get it in Moda. You can get it wherever you want. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Speaker 1: The pro slob company. No. No. Obviously, makes a lot of sense, but take us through the thesis.

Speaker 8: Yeah. For sure. So the launch, this was unexpected. Mhmm. Like, obviously, you know, we put a lot of effort into like, putting together this video, this narrative. Shout out to Shon Media who helped us with the video and things like that. The, the unexpected part was, like, the controversy around it. I guess, I mean, I did put a lot of effort into those, like, first two sentences. I think I spent, like, you know, I don't know, many many hours writing and rewriting them.

Speaker 2: You baited them.

Speaker 1: Wait. Remind everyone what the first two sentences were.

Speaker 8: The first two sentences were, we raised 7 and a half million to kill AI slop. Introducing Moda, the world's first AI design agent with taste. Yeah. Now, know the world's first is like Yeah. Triggering to people because it's like, you know. You're

Speaker 2: staking out your territory. Yeah. But it's Yeah. And I I think part of that part of that is like I think generally right now there's been so many companies in every category that people have launch fatigue and for better or worse Yeah. Even if something's like cool and a new approach, they will try to find some way to to pick it apart. But but yeah, I I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. How how are you how are you seeing the competitive landscape? You know, making slides and websites are things that basically every comp it seems like almost every company in the world is, like, converging on having a product to do something like this. You guys are specializing in it. That'll give you some edge, but, like, how do you how do you see the space evolving?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So I'll say a few things. First of all, our our launch had, I think, like, 8,000,000 impressions on, like, Twitter across, like, my video, other content, LinkedIn. We had a absolute insane amount of sign ups. Like, there the market is saying that our this problem is not solved yet, which was my thesis when we started this company. And to give a little bit of background about myself, I'm a second time founder. My previous company, Dover, was backed by Founders Fund and NYC, and I've been through product market fit. I've scaled the company. When I went out to fundraise for Moda, I was met with a lot of skepticism. People were like, why are you starting another AI design thingy? Mhmm. And I think it really comes down to the details here. I wanna get too much into talking about, like, competitors right now and, like, the landscape and, like, detail. But I will say that, everyone is kind of taking this approach of, let's go with the coding agents. Let's like, Claude is really good at writing code. Right? Let's get Claude to, like, slop up a PowerPoint. Right? Like, just like spit out some HTML, looks like a PowerPoint, let's go. Those PowerPoints all look the same. They all have like boxes and like, you know, and and then you go and try to edit it. Right? And it's like, you're stuck in like this like weird drag and drop like kind of world, and you don't kinda have that control. So I think that the best AI tools are not the ones that help you save time. They have a place. Right? So it's like, a lot of AI tools have this pitch, oh, like, you're a marketer. You can create like a million ad creatives in like thirty seconds. Great. Right? They're all probably your slop. I think the best AI tools are the ones that like let you do things that you never could have done before.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 8: Right? And this is like the magic of Cloud Code and things like that. And we want to do that for design. And I think in order to truly do that, you truly need to actually have like a like, this is a little bit technical, but like an actual vector canvas. Like, where you can put something in one place exactly and move it to another place. You can draw things. You can literally create anything in there. Right? And so we took this very different approach where we built an agent that is not outputting HTML. It's not outputting, like, you know, an image like Nano Banana or anything like that. It took us, like, months to build this. Like, it just didn't work for, like we we tried, like, five different approaches. It just, like, didn't work. Didn't work. Didn't work. Finally, it started working. And, it's just very different from what anyone else is doing. And I think this is gonna really unlock this kind of, like, next level of creativity for people, in my opinion. That's gonna let them create stuff that they could never do before. So I'm very bullish. The people who have been signing up, it's kind of been it's been insane. Like, the range is just like there's, like, investment bankers, like, analysts signing up, and then there's, like, sheepskin farmers in New Zealand like and people like messaging me like the craziest shit that they've like done with this product already. And so I'm like, okay, I think we're onto something. And, yeah, the competition's gonna

Speaker 4: be fun.

Speaker 2: Very good.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We talked to an AI director Billy Boman earlier today and the the I mean he was voicing over like the need for tools and like he doesn't That

Speaker 2: was his number one request.

Speaker 1: He does not want to walk in a in a text Yeah. And and and he's done this like literal Super Bowl ads using AI, leaning into AI, being very aggressive about it Yeah.

Speaker 2: And the time saving too. He was like, yeah, that our average project is like six weeks something like that. So he's not he's not trying to sell entirely on speeding up timelines. He's trying to sell on how do we do things that we were not Would be possible

Speaker 1: otherwise with this budget.

Speaker 2: With traditional, you know, shooting. So Yeah. Yeah. Very, very cool.

Speaker 8: Yeah. One interesting thing just as like a side note that might be, second interesting insight. I've been getting so many support requests that I've just started sending people like a Google Meet link and I'm like, can you talk right now? I'm in this Google Meet. So Just hanging out here. Good day. Say it again?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like an open window into whoever wants to talk. Yeah.

Speaker 6: It's great.

Speaker 8: It's just an open window. Yeah. I talked to this guy today who's like who works at this like firm in The UK. Mhmm. He set up this like insane Claude plus Moda thing where he has these like his entire like job is like in all these claude.md skill files. Yeah. And he has connected it to all these tools via MCP. Yeah. And I was like, how did you even do this? Like, yeah, we have an MCP service, like not even like really documented. I don't know how you figured all this He he did some crazy shit. I don't know how he did it. That's crazy. But I've been astounded by the amount of like businesses I've spoken to that are like, we need your API, need your MCP. Like, luckily, have all that, but like, it it's just like the the way that products are getting used right now is completely different than anything I've ever seen. Mhmm. It's like everyone wants to like chain together these things. They want like Yeah. This level of like things talking to each other in automation. Like, I've been, you know, building products for many years. For a consumer product like ours, I would never build an API on day one. But now I'm like, oh my god, our API needs to be like one of the the like first party things that we that we do basically. So Yeah. That's been interesting as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Someone in the chat mentioned, I I forgot about this, but Google just launched Stitch, like, last week, which is so funny because the whole idea of, like, Stitches transform ideas into UI designs for mobile web application. Mhmm. So it's so funny because fifteen years ago, you would have been getting the question maybe, like, what if Google does this? And then, of course, they they they come out with this. But as we've seen with you know, I expect this market to evolve, like, similar to CodeGen where, you know, mass massive market, tons of opportunity to just focus and and, you know, you have an advantage being a nimble startup. How big is a team right now?

Speaker 8: We are five people. Like, the couple friends that I've dragged into this helping me out right now. So we are hiring if, anyone watching this, wants a job. Yeah. No. It's been absolutely insane. I think that, in some ways, like, the the the hate is kind of interesting as well because it's like, I've been, you know, getting people, like, retweeting, being like, look at these, like, people, like, raising all this venture capital, like, doing this. I'm like, yo. We're like a five person team. Like, we did not expect this. Like, we're just, like, keep it gotta keep up right now. And yeah. But it's been really fun. And yeah. Very excited to sort of see where we go from here.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Ignore ignore the haters. Keep shipping.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come Yeah. Was great.

Speaker 2: It was great to meet Yeah. Yeah. Congrats on the

Speaker 1: on the big week. I'm sure I'm

Speaker 2: sure you won't have much of a weekend with all the inbound. But Good luck. Good luck building.

Speaker 1: Good to see you soon.

Speaker 8: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Have a

Speaker 4: good week. Alright.

Speaker 8: See

Speaker 1: you. Let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. I love that sound cue. But we don't have our next guys. He will be joining in just a few minutes. I'm I'm just laughing about, you know, I I obviously don't wanna diminish a 7 and a half million dollar raise. That's a great amount of funding, but it's just so funny to imagine, like, trying to redirect the people. Like, the type of people that are gonna hate on a 7 and a half million dollar raise are not gonna understand, like, well, no. No. No. Look at Google's cash flow. Like, they're drawing down tens of billions. Like, you should be more focused on them, But they won't I think that will fall on deaf ears. Well, in the billions is Josh Kushner's new fundraising for Thrive Holdings. They're in talks to raise 2 plus billion dollars. Is this the Thrive Capital offshoot? Tyler's happy about it.

Speaker 2: They're saying he's one of the greatest capital raising athletes

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: Of all time.

Speaker 1: Bringing AI to industries like accounting and IT.

Speaker 2: I wanna pull up this video from Northwestern University. Researchers developed modular robots using AI that can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain.

Speaker 1: Is it is it a scary robot or is it like a nice friendly robot?

Speaker 2: You're not gonna like this robot.

Speaker 1: I'm hoping for oh, that is terrifying looking. What

Speaker 2: happened here? Sound.

Speaker 1: You gotta go back to the beginning. This thing is so wild. Oh, well.

Speaker 2: I can't

Speaker 1: hear What a crazy Oh, they're hitting with a stick. Oh, no. You can't be doing that. Which is why It can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain. Let's play let's play some of this video. Let's play more. Because it's only fifty six seconds.

Speaker 2: Playing playing videos is It's kind a lost art form here on TBPN.

Speaker 1: Goes back and forth. But apparently, the leg breaks off and it keeps keeps crawling. It keeps it's the Terminator. Yeah. Not the one that you've seen. Let's see.

Speaker 2: It's crazy how terrible it looks. Yeah. It's sending very strong negative signals to my brain.

Speaker 1: Even just like painting it blue would probably be an upgrade.

Speaker 9: This means

Speaker 2: I think now

Speaker 5: I'm gonna get better this is better than when we saw the I think it was the unitary get down on all fours and crawl around.

Speaker 2: That was that was terrible.

Speaker 9: There's some

Speaker 2: very Yeah. But there's just something about those movements that tells my simple human mind to run.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It spikes your cortisol. No. No? No?

Speaker 2: No. Move

Speaker 1: themselves through the world. What else is your fear

Speaker 4: response?

Speaker 2: I would never let anything spike.

Speaker 1: Said you'd make it it it stimulates your your brain. The fear response Well,

Speaker 2: I've trained my cortisol response. Okay. I've trained my my mind to be able to

Speaker 1: Well, so has the Luxmaxing streamer, Clavicular, who has been arrested in Florida. He he was caught in a TMZ mugshot, so that's important news for those who have been following his story. The video is crazy, and we'll see. It's always weird with these stories from the the kick streamers. It like, whether it's all, you know, planted story, whether they, you know, got something to go viral and it's engineered or they did it, you know, by accident. I don't know. But I'm sure that there will be more reporting. I believe Taylor Lorenz is on the case. NVIDIA backed startup seeking to counter Chinese AI eyes a $25,000,000,000 valuation. This is from Reflection, Berber Jin writes in the in the Wall Street

Speaker 2: I wonder I am so curious what their traction money. Progress.

Speaker 1: He is a $25,000,000,000 company. He's running like a $4,000,000,000 a $4,000,000,000,000 company. Like, can he squeeze the pennies out of the couch cushion? I think he can.

Speaker 2: No. No. It's not that. I'm just wondering I'm just

Speaker 1: with NVIDIA to do open source.

Speaker 2: They're this is a tremendous valuation for a company that I don't believe has released a product yet. So whatever they're cooking must be pretty darn good.