Why We Invested In Obello

Every company has a story to tell. Yet that goal is increasingly hard to achieve in a world of fragmented media channels. Marketing a brand now requires companies to span dozens of formats, languages, platforms, and devices. The result is often a creative bottleneck that forces teams to choose: Do we keep tight control of our brand identity and limit our reach, or do we decentralize design and risk diluting our voice and consistency?

Obello was purpose-built to solve this tension. It’s an AI graphic design platform that helps brands produce high-quality, on-brand creative—quickly and at scale—without sacrificing the soul of the brand itself. We see it as a world positive idea that levels the economic playing field and gives companies of all sizes the tools to grow their business and reach new customers.

A bold vision

Obello’s origin story is rooted in a familiar moment: the brand handoff. Founders Ben Pham and Ollie Ralph, both veterans of the acclaimed design studio Character, spent years crafting brand guidelines for clients like Apple, Netflix, and DoorDash. But the same challenge came up again and again. After they’d hand off detailed branding specs, teams struggled to apply them in the wild. Real-world marketing teams, often strapped for time and headcount, struggled to make brand-consistent content at the pace the company needed to market itself.

Obello makes brand systems dynamic. Instead of rigid templates or one-shot generative outputs, it offers a layout engine trained on the logic of graphic design, including hierarchy, balance, spacing, and rhythm. It adapts layouts to each use case, such as email headers, paid social posts, or product announcements,  while preserving the brand’s consistent voice.

At the core of Obello is the Generative Layout Assistant Model, using modern AI approaches to deliver truly generative design. GLAM is trained to deeply understand graphic design structure. Obello helps teams generate consistent, responsive layouts that feel fully designed, even when they’re produced quickly. That means lifecycle marketers can spin up emails without hacking HTML and growth teams can create campaign variants without violating brand rules. Equipping marketing teams with these tools in turn frees up designers to focus on design systems and new campaigns, rather than resizing assets or policing fonts.

Built with intention

Obello’s founders made deliberate choices about how they would build the company and who it would serve. Rather than scraping the internet for training data, Ben and Ollie and their team spent a year creating layouts manually, curating design principles and building a dataset rooted in good judgment. The slower path reflected a deep respect for the creative community they come from.

They didn’t want to build a product that replaces designers, but one that enhances their work, reach, and ability to think big. As co-founder Ollie put it, “We’re building efficiencies into designers’ process so they don’t have to spend time on the menial, repetitive work.”

Obello has already proven this is possible. Brands like eBay, REI, Ritual, ZenBusiness, OSEA, Whisker, and Thistle are using Obello to scale their output while staying true to their identity.

The company fits into Obvious’s Economic Health pillar, which broadly aims to give more people the tools to do meaningful work. We also believe in the founders who know the terrain. Ben and Ollie have lived this problem from every angle—agency, brand, strategy, production—and they’ve built a tool that reflects that experience with care and precision. As companies scale, the need for clear, consistent storytelling only grows. Obello helps teams meet that challenge without losing their voice. We’re proud to support their vision.