Apple and Netflix design veterans have raised $8.5 million for Obello, a new creative platform built to help brands produce high-quObello Lands $8.5M to Supercharge Brand Contentality content at the pace today’s digital world demands. The round was led by Obvious Ventures, with support from Baukunst, AVV, and Preview Ventures, bringing Obello’s total funding to $9.5 million.
The fresh capital will fuel Obello’s next phase of growth. The team plans to expand its image and video generation tools, strengthen integrations with design and marketing ecosystems, and scale across mid-market and enterprise clients.
Obello was founded by longtime collaborators Ben Pham and Ollie Ralph, the creative minds behind Character, the acclaimed brand agency later acquired by Dentsu. Over the years, they helped shape the identities of Apple, Nike, DoorDash, Instagram, Netflix, and other global brands.
Those experiences brought them face-to-face with a growing problem: modern brands must create endless content for dozens of platforms, and production pipelines built for a slower world can no longer keep up.
Designers are overwhelmed. Brand teams struggle to stay consistent. And the result is content that slips off-brand as demand keeps rising. Ben and Ollie saw the opportunity to fix this by rethinking how creative work scales. That insight became Obello.
At the heart of Obello is the Generative Layout Assistant Model, or GLAM. It’s a new kind of layout engine that can intelligently resize, adapt, and regenerate visual assets with a single click.
Instead of breaking designs or losing structure, GLAM adjusts spacing, typography, imagery, and composition to keep every version brand-perfect. Teams upload their assets, define their brand rules, and the platform handles the rest, across static content, motion design, and automated workflows.
Obello is also taking aim at one of marketing’s most outdated tools: HTML email builders. Rather than forcing brands into rigid templates, the system produces responsive, customizable emails that match each brand’s identity by default. Early users already include eBay, REI, ZenBusiness, Ritual, OSEA, Fetch, Stasher, Thistle, Output, Whisker, and Qonta, with agency-focused features coming next.
The founders say their goal is not to replace creative teams but to amplify them. With repetitive production handled by Obello, designers can shift their time toward strategy, storytelling, and higher-impact work. Investors share the same conviction, arguing that Obello sits at the intersection of brand identity, automation, and next-generation design.
With roots in world-class creative work and a platform built to solve real bottlenecks, Obello is positioning itself to become the system of record for brands that want to move fast without losing who they are.
Another reason Obello is gaining attention is its timing. Brands are under pressure to ship more content than ever, but budgets and headcount are not growing at the same pace. AI tools promise speed, yet many fail to respect brand nuance. Obello’s pitch lands in that gap by treating brand rules as first-class inputs, not afterthoughts, which makes automation feel safe rather than risky for large teams.
There is also a clear enterprise angle emerging. As marketing organizations scale, governance becomes just as important as creativity. Obello gives brand leaders a way to lock in visual standards while still empowering distributed teams to move quickly. That balance between control and freedom is something legacy design systems and generic AI tools struggle to deliver.
Looking ahead, the founders see Obello expanding beyond asset production into a broader creative operating layer. As brands increasingly rely on AI-generated visuals, layouts, and motion, the need for systems that understand context, hierarchy, and identity will only grow. Obello is betting that the future of brand content is not just faster creation, but smarter creation that stays true at scale.
