Our story

About a decade ago, we founded an AI gaming company called Osmo, with a mission to make learning fun for kids. While we succeeded in delighting children, our own work wasn't as much fun. Endless 10-page documents and 100-slides decks were the norm, and too many of these bored us to death.

Occasionally, we saw an amazing visual that truly captured the essence of an idea, bringing the aha moment, removing misconceptions, and creating a shared mental model. It was clear that visuals are key to bringing joy and efficiency to business communication.

However, despite seeing the power of visuals, we saw that creating them is no easy task. Few people use them effectively. Most of us don’t know where to start or how to make them compelling, so we’re stuck only writing text.

At Osmo, we developed advanced AI to detect game pieces in real-time, giving us a solid foundation for this problem. We first tried to replicate the experience of two people doodling ideas on paper, but digitally with AI. After many iterations, we realized that even with the best AI, starting with drawing is a huge barrier for most people, especially those we set out to help.

Then, LLMs rose in power to perfectly complement our efforts. A text-first entry point became viable, allowing us to transform text into visuals. This marked the birth of Napkin, making visual communication accessible to everyone.

Our mission

At Napkin, our mission is to give everyone the power of visuals in their communication. We want to bring visuals to conversations where there are none today and enable people who never think about visuals to become dynamic visual storytellers. With Napkin, everyone will become a more effective storyteller.

Meet the team

At the heart of Napkin.ai is a small, dedicated team—dreamers, designers, and developers from the US, France, and India—united to improve how people communicate in the business world. We’re constantly learning and iterating to help our users communicate visually.