Kodo

Michael Goldstein, Luca Galvani, Daniel Hughes, Viraj Mahajan, and Naga Pramod looked at the design industry and said "yeah, dragging boxes around for hours is so 2019." They built Kodo, an AI design tool that creates fully editable posters, presentations, and menus just by typing what you want. You want a coffee shop menu? Type it. You want a birthday invitation? Type it. Kodo spits out a complete, polished design in seconds that you can actually edit—not some weird image file you can't touch. Manual editing tools are always free, because apparently they believe everyone deserves access to professional design without selling a kidney.

Here's the kicker: Kodo is positioning itself as a professional alternative to Figma and Canva. That's a bold move when you're going up against companies worth billions, but the pricing speaks for itself—$0 for 40 credits/month with 10 projects, or $29/month for 600 credits and unlimited projects. Each AI-generated design costs 3-9 credits. Do the math. For the price of a fancy coffee, you can generate dozens of professional designs while Figma users are still fighting with frames and auto-layout. Real-time collaboration is included on every plan, because nothing says "modern startup" like multiple people staring at the same design simultaneously.