OpenArt’s Series A and the Acceleration of Infrastructure-First Consumer

Jan 30 2026

Announcing OpenArt’s $30M Series A

Last year, Lan wrote about the emergence of infrastructure-first consumer companies — businesses that look like consumer products on the surface, but are fundamentally built on deeply technical, vertically integrated systems underneath. At the time, the pattern was just becoming visible. One of the clearest early examples was our portfolio company OpenArt.

Today, OpenArt is announcing a $30M Series A led by Canaan, following a year of efficient growth that has taken the company to over 8 million MAU and $70M in ARR.

In May of 2025 when we published our original post, OpenArt had grown from less than $1M to roughly $10M in ARR with a team of just eight people. That alone was notable, but the real excitement lay in imagining how these dynamics would evolve at scale — and in the sense that we had yet to test the upper limits of compounding efficiency.

Another year of growth made two things clear: we’re still far from the ceiling, and the extent to which infrastructure-first businesses compound as they scale remains under-appreciated. OpenArt scaled with its team of less than 10 people to over $30M in ARR by August, and then more than doubled again to $70M ARR, while only increasing its team to 20. This revenue amounts to roughly $3.5M in revenue per employee — beating Apple and knocking on the door of Nvidia in revenue efficiency.

What’s most important here isn’t just growth — it’s how that growth happened. OpenArt didn’t scale by layering on marketing spend or just expanding headcount. It scaled by doubling down on infrastructure: building internal systems that aggressively augment every employee and remove friction from continuous product iteration across new creative formats and model capabilities.

We don’t believe we’ve seen the full extent of what’s possible yet. Rather than diluting with scale, OpenArt’s revenue per employee has increased as it grows — a reminder that in infrastructure-first consumer businesses, automation compounds efficiency as demand scales. We’re still early in the compounding curve, and far from understanding its upper bounds.

We’re excited to continue partnering with the OpenArt team as they take the next step in democratizing creativity with AI and empowering creatives to build next-generation media empires — bringing the next phase of infrastructure-first consumer growth into focus.