Brand Guidelines, Meet AI
Today, we’re moving Obello from closed beta to general availability. Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with build partners including eBay, REI, and Spanx to build a platform that empowers brands to create high-quality, on-brand design assets at scale.
We’ve raised $8.5 million in seed funding led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Baukunst, AVV, and Preview Ventures.
Great brand design means the world to us. For over nearly 20 years, we ran a branding agency called Character to turn clients’ visions into incredible, beautiful, brand identities. We know that iconic brands are crafted by creatives, who sweat every detail no matter how small—every bend of a logo, each pixel, the perfect shade—until the brand identity is perfect.
Still, we spent years handing off these beautiful brand guidelines and watching them fail in execution because teams needed to move at a faster pace. After we sold Character, we saw an opportunity to make brand guidelines actually work at scale, so we started Obello.
From the beginning, we wanted to train our models to reflect our deep respect for the design community we come from. Instead of pulling designs from the internet, we trained our generative layout assistant model on designs we created with our own hands, inside Obello. We spent a year teaching our model what good design looks like by teaching it principles like composition, hierarchy, balance, breathing room, and grid structure.
Introducing Obello
Obello’s vision is to make brand systems dynamic, so they can evolve with your business. We built Obello to free designers from the endless cycle of brand review and production work, so they can focus on strategy, storytelling, and the creative decisions that actually move brands forward. By transforming brand rules into automated AI tools, we empower entire teams to create on-brand content quickly, without sacrificing quality or compromising the integrity of the brand.
Robust brand governance
Great brands are built on systems, not one-off decisions. Obello embeds your brand guidelines into AI tools your entire team can build with.
Set up your workspace in minutes by uploading your brand assets such as logos, fonts, colors, photography, and videos.
Define your brand rules once: logo clear space, typography treatments, color pairings, CTA button styles. These rules become automated tools that enforce themselves across every design your team creates.
Create on-brand content at scale with Gen Studio
Most AI image generation tools let anyone type anything and generate whatever they want. These tools make it nearly impossible to keep outputs on-brand, or even adhere to copyright laws, which limit how useful they are for brand teams.
We built Gen Studio with these considerations in mind, and made sure it only generates on-brand graphic design assets. For example, before you can generate a product photo, Gen Studio needs you to train it on your products by uploading photos of different angles and perspectives. You add approved art direction next: the photography style, lighting, and composition that defines your brand.
It’s only after you’ve set that context for Gen Studio that you can start generating on-brand images and videos using natural language prompts.
Comprehensive agency workflow management
Obello lets you manage multiple client brands from a single platform. Create dedicated workspaces for each client where their assets, rules, and Gen Studio training stay securely separated. Design master templates that clients can use confidently without unraveling your work.
When you’re ready, you can transfer ownership and billing to the client. The client becomes the administrator, while the brand system you built continues to protect the brand rules.
What’s next?
Today, we’re opening Obello up to everyone. If you’re a designer who’s spent years perfecting brand systems, Obello gives you the infrastructure to see that work come to life at scale. If you’re leading a team that needs to create hundreds of assets without losing brand integrity, you can now move at the speed your business demands. And if you’re an agency managing multiple client brands, you have a single platform to orchestrate it all.
We built Obello to help great brands move faster by transforming brand rules into AI tools. Our hope is that it frees you up to focus on the work that energizes you: the strategy, the storytelling, the creative decisions that matter. We’re excited to see what you create!