Communicating ideas effectively in today's fast-paced, information-saturated world can be challenging. Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler aim to simplify this with Napkin, a new "visual AI" platform designed to turn text into visually appealing content. Launching today with $10 million in funding from Accel and CRV, Napkin promises to streamline the design process for marketers, content creators, engineers, and other professionals.

Sharma and Scholler, frustrated by the proliferation of documents and presentations in corporate environments, sought a solution that minimizes the time and effort required for design. Sharma, previously the founder of educational games company Osmo, and Scholler, who has experience at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and Google, developed Napkin to address these challenges.

“Napkin’s core product is targeted toward those in the business of selling ideas and creating content,” Sharma told “Our goal is to turn the design process into a mostly generative flow, reducing the headache and time involved.”

Napkin operates through a web-based platform where users begin with text, such as a presentation or outline, or generate text from a prompt. The platform then creates a Notion-like canvas with the text, allowing users to transform paragraphs into customizable visuals with a simple click.

These visuals include various styles of flowcharts, graphs, infographics, Venn diagrams, and decision trees. Users can swap icons from Napkin's gallery, connect concepts visually, and customize colors and fonts. The platform also offers decorators like highlights and underlines to enhance the visual elements.

Once the visuals are created, they can be exported as PNG, PDF, or SVG files, or shared via a URL linking to the canvas. “Unlike existing tools that add a generative component to an editor, we focus on a generation-first experience, with editing as a complementary feature,” Sharma said.

During a test of Napkin, the platform excelled in creating visuals for straightforward descriptions and clearly defined ideas. However, it struggled with more complex and nuanced text, sometimes generating unrelated visuals.

Sharma reassured that Napkin’s generated visuals do not use public or IP-protected data, ensuring users do not have to worry about copyright issues. He acknowledged that while the platform currently offers a generic design style, improvements are underway to enhance the quality and diversity of visuals.

Napkin, with its 10-person team based in Los Altos, plans to grow to 15 by the end of the year. Sharma and Scholler, successful entrepreneurs who sold Osmo to Indian edtech giant Byju’s for $120 million in 2019, have impressed investors like Accel’s Rich Wong, who backed Napkin due to their track record.

“Jerome and Pramod have an uncanny ability to make complex technical challenges easy for users,” Wong said. “We are excited to support Napkin as it brings visual AI to business storytelling.”

The $10 million funding will be used for product development and hiring AI engineers and graphic designers. “We are investing all our resources into enhancing Napkin's ability to generate relevant and compelling visuals from text,” Sharma stated. “There are endless ways to visualize and design, and we aim to build depth and improve AI quality.”