A C-SUITE VIEW ON AIWe speak with leaders about how their companies are putting artificial intelligence to work. In this edition, Tech in Asia talks to Jose Florido, chief market development officer at Magnific, the creative platform formerly known as Freepik, about why the company's rebrand is more than cosmetic. Magnific said in April that it had reached US$230 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) while serving more than 1 million paid subscribers. It aims to end 2026 at US$500 million ARR. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.  Freepik recently rebranded as Magnific. What is the company trying to become now? We moved from being a stock house to an AI-first company. We had a lot of content and tools for creatives, but what has not changed is that creators and creatives are still at the center. We are just giving them the best tools available at the moment. Essentially, we didn't change that much. It's the world that is changing around us. At some point, our previous name stopped reflecting what we do. We are no longer a search engine for free images. We want to be the trusted tool for professionals creating on-brand content, advertising, and films. How much of the business is now driven by AI? We do not disclose all the details, but AI is already larger than the previous stock business. It is also growing much faster. Alongside individual customers, we have businesses or teams, which are small companies with fewer than 20 employees. That is very recent; we created it around four months ago, and we already have more than 5,000 companies there. Then we have enterprises, which are about 10 months old. We already have more than 300 global enterprises there. Enterprise is the fastest-growing business. It's on track to be 20% of the business by the end of the year. What changes when Magnific sells to enterprises instead of individual creators? For enterprises, we are targeting companies that can spend more than US$100,000 a year on AI for creativity. What we see globally is that everyone is becoming more like a film production house. Brands are producing longer content, even short movies, because now they can. The reason a brand used to do a 20-second spot in a fixed location was because of technology and cost limitations. If you remove part of that limitation with AI, they are going to do more. These customers need things like indemnification, security parameters, and compliance. It's all about trust. We become their trusted partner to use AI in a safe and legal way. This matters even in markets where regulation may be lighter. A large studio in Singapore, for example, may be under less regulation or pressure locally, but they serve global customers. It's not only compliance. It's legal reviews, ethical reviews, internal policies, and IP. Different parts of the world care about different things. The US is very focused on lawsuits and IP. Other countries may focus more on ethical reviews. That also changes how we sell to enterprises. Our go-to-market is twofold: sales, but also professional services. AI can be scary for many companies, and the way we win is by helping them adopt it. We employ some of the top creatives in the world, and they are able to partner with customers as forward-deployed creatives. Why is Asia becoming a bigger focus? We have had a team in Singapore, Japan, and India for about a year now, especially since we started our enterprise solution. The US has been our focus, but the next stage of growth is definitely Asia Pacific. In B2C, we are already very globally distributed. We are very strong in Brazil, India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. We also see a huge community of creators and cultural influence coming from the region. For 2026, the goal is to establish our presence and be well-known here through the community and events. Is Magnific building its own AI models, using third-party models, or both? Both. Magnific is a top partner of model providers in the US, China, and elsewhere. We provide the best models, and we are often first to market with new models and solutions. At the same time, we have our own research lab. We have developed two foundation models to date. The first one is F Lite, which was trained on our own stock catalog. It's a very IP-safe model trained on content that we own completely. Very transparently, it doesn't reach the same level of realism as the top state-of-the-art models. But for some customers, if you prompt it in certain ways, it can meet their needs with absolute certainty of ownership and copyright. Some customers also partner with us to train or customize models for a specific industry or use case. We are not trying to compete as a mainstream research lab, but we have the technical capabilities to work across different layers of the market. In markets like Indonesia, tools like Canva, Adobe, and CapCut are already widely used. How does Magnific compete? We see ourselves a little differently. We offer an extra layer of control for professionals using AI. Other solutions may be good for one-click, fast content production, especially for social content. But if you want to do top-level, high-quality content, like longer-format advertising for global platforms, we have a strong position. We are not looking to replace creatives with one-click solutions. We are creating a thicker layer of experience where you can deploy your IP, your brand kits, and collaboration across your team and customers. It's the whole creative process that you can do in Magnific from start to finish. |
