a bootstrapped, profitable $230M ARR AI creative platform



The new name unifies what was previously fragmented across Freepik (stock assets), Magnific (AI upscaling), and several other products. One million paying subscribers. 250 enterprise customers, including BBC, Puma, and Amazon Prime Video. CEO Joaquín Cuenca has never taken outside investment. The company is profitable.


Freepik, the Málaga-founded AI creative platform, announced on Tuesday that it is rebranding as Magnific, unifying its full product stack under a single name for the first time.

The rebrand is not cosmetic. It reflects the consolidation of what had been, from the outside, a confusing portfolio: Freepik as a stock asset library, Magnific as an AI image upscaler acquired in May 2024, and several other AI tools operating under separate brands.

The numbers behind the rebrand are striking for a company that has never raised outside investment. Fortune confirmed that Magnific has reached $230 million in annualised recurring revenue.

The company has more than one million paying subscribers, more than 250 enterprise customers, including the BBC, Puma, Carl’s Jr, DeliveryHero, Huel, R/GA, Damm, Job&Talent, and Amazon Prime Video’s series House of David, and more than four million images generated per day. Andreessen Horowitz has named Magnific the top generative AI web company in Europe by users, placing it ahead of well-capitalised American competitors across a ranking based on actual platform usage.

Cuenca built this on zero venture capital. When Fortune asked whether he would raise in the future, he said: “If we do it, it’s because we want to grow the DNA of the company”, not because of financial necessity.

Freepik was founded in 2010 in Málaga by Cuenca and his brother Alejandro. Cuenca had previously co-founded Panoramio, a geotagged photo-sharing platform that Google acquired in 2007, his first exit.

Freepik began as an internal tool to find quality graphic resources and grew into a global stock asset platform used in more than 200 countries. The pivot to generative AI began in earnest with the acquisition of Magnific in May 2024.

Magnific was itself founded in Murcia, Spain, by Javi López and Emilio Nicolás; it had gone viral within days of its launch, signing up more than 30,000 users within 24 hours and reaching 725,000 registered users without paid advertising. Both founders remain with the company following the acquisition.

The unified Magnific platform now covers the full creative stack: AI image and video generation (including 4K with audio); its original AI upscaling and enhancement technology; a real-time collaborative workspace; exclusive 3D and virtual scene tools; an AI assistant; an Academy for team training; and the original library of 250 million-plus creative assets. Critically, Magnific is model-agnostic: it lets users select from third-party video AI models including Google’s Veo 3.1 and ByteDance’s Seeddance 2.0, and combines them with its own tools.

That orchestration layer, letting enterprises pick the best model for each task rather than being locked to a single provider, is the same architecture that has driven adoption of multi-model AI platforms in enterprise software generally.

The “no-collar economy” framing that Cuenca uses to describe the platform’s societal positioning is the most ambitious version of the rebrand’s implications. His argument, made to Fortune and in the official rebrand announcement, is that the industrial revolution created blue-collar jobs and the digital revolution created white-collar jobs, and that AI is now creating a new class of creative work that requires neither physical labour nor institutional professional credentials.

72 per cent of new creators joining the platform identify as beginners. The Business plan launched for smaller teams in January 2026 surpassed 2,000 subscriptions in six weeks and is growing at 150 new teams per week.

Cuenca has said: “In the future we will make movies in the same way we write books, one person with a vision and the tools to execute it.”

That is a bold prediction but not an entirely implausible one, and it is exactly the kind of market framing that attracts enterprise attention.

The competitive context matters. Magnific is competing directly with Midjourney, Runway, Leonardo, Adobe Firefly, and a range of well-capitalised US AI creative platforms, without any of them offering the same integrated end-to-end creative stack, according to the company’s own positioning.

Magnific’s advantage is not a superior model, it uses the same frontier models as its competitors, but a unified workflow platform that reduces the friction of combining multiple AI tools in production.

Its bootstrapped, profitable status means it has survived and grown through the entire AI investment boom without becoming dependent on the capital cycle that has constrained many of its VC-backed competitors.

The rebrand to Magnific is the moment the company chooses to present that full platform picture publicly for the first time, and to compete for enterprise AI creative budgets under a single brand identity rather than a fragmented product catalogue.



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With the start of April, Netflix is welcoming entertaining movies that will be available to stream for the foreseeable future. One of the new movies I’m ready to watch is Thrash, a new shark movie where the Jaws-like creatures wreak havoc on a coastal town during a hurricane. It might only be spring, but I’ll watch this type of survival thriller any time of the year.

Speaking of thrillers, there are several prominent movies featured on the genre page. My top pick for thrillers this week is a gritty punk-rock film, now streaming on Netflix in the U.S. The other two thrillers we want to spotlight are a twisty crime tale from the 1990s and an allegorical dystopian mystery set in prison.

3

The Platform

Maybe don’t watch on a full stomach

Read what I wrote under the title again. The Platform is not for viewers with queasy stomachs. I have a strong stomach, and yet there are several moments when certain prisoners chow down where I wanted to look away. Between that and the violence, watching before dinner might be the move.

In a dystopian future, there is a prison called the Vertical Self-Management Center. Two prisoners are stationed on each floor, and there is a giant hole in the center. Every day, a platform filled with food lowers to the floor. Prisoners can have as much food as they want when the platform is on their level. However, they can no longer eat when the platform lowers to the next floor. The higher you are in the building, the more food you’ll have at your disposal. The lower floors are left to eat the scraps.

The Platform has much to say about social inequality and greed. I did not expect the Spanish thriller to be as gory as it was. This movie reflects how society treats the rich and the poor, so I should have expected a few uprisings. Overall, it’s a surprisingly effective thriller.​​​​​​​

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Wild Things

A steamy thriller from the 1990s

The following phrase is meant as a compliment: Wild Things is sexy trash. It is unapologetically lustful. It’s like playing Mad Libs with an erotic thriller. Plus, its attractive cast—Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Kevin Bacon—adds to the appeal.

In Miami, high school counselor Sam Lombardo (Dillon) is accused of raping popular student Kelly Van Ryan (Richards) and outcast Suzie Toller (Campbell). Sam then hires sleazy lawyer Kenneth Bowden (Murray) to defend him at trial. As the case progresses, Detective Duquette (Bacon) remains suspicious of the girls’ motives and questions whether Sam is innocent.

I’m being intentionally vague in my synopsis because of the significant twists this movie takes. Even if you guess one of the twists, more will follow. It approaches parody with how ridiculous it is, but I’m a sucker for this movie. It’s a soap opera with scandal, murder, and sexual longing. Wild Things is a scripted version of your favorite reality TV show.​​​​​​​

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Caught Stealing

Austin Butler races around New York City

Austin Butler has the “it factor.” Ever since Elvis, Hollywood has been pushing Butler as one of its future stars. The 34-year-old has the looks and skills of an A-list talent. He has good taste, as evidenced by the directors he works with, a list that includes Quentin Tarantino, Jeff Nichols, Denis Villeneuve, Ari Aster, and Darren Aronofsky.

Butler headlined Aronofsky’s 2025 crime thriller Caught Stealing. In the late 1990s, Hank (Butler) is a bartender living in New York City. Hank had aspirations of playing in the MLB, but a car accident derailed his opportunity. One day, Hank’s neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) asks him to look after his cat. That small task somehow leads to Hank going on the run from Russian mobsters.

Butler is the perfect actor for this star-making performance that would have taken him to new heights had it come out in the 1990s. Caught Stealing was considered a box office flop—$32 million on an estimated budget of $40 million. I don’t necessarily blame Butler for the poor box office. I think the August 29 release date played a role in its poor performance. Butler’s inclusion in a project might not lead to significant financial gains. However, I appreciate that he made a grimy mid-budget crime thriller that has seemingly disappeared from today’s movie landscape. If Butler’s down to make more crime capers with breakneck action and frenetic pacing, sign me up.


More movies and shows to stream on Netflix

Netflix users in the United States, you got it made. There are thousands of movies and TV shows to stream with the push of a button. For some family-friendly content with Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is now on Netflix. If you want something more adult-focused, give some serials like Black Mirror a chance.

Subscription with ads

Yes, $8/month

Simultaneous streams

Two or four




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