Awen Thinks You Should Talk to Your Design Software

The Macro: Creative Software Has an Interface Problem

Adobe has owned creative software for three decades. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro. The tools are incredibly powerful. They’re also incredibly complex. I’ve watched professional designers navigate Photoshop and it looks like they’re playing a musical instrument. Keyboard shortcuts memorized, panels arranged just so, muscle memory built over years. The learning curve isn’t a curve. It’s a wall.

This complexity creates two problems. First, it gates creativity behind technical skill. Plenty of people with great visual ideas never execute on them because they can’t operate the tools. Second, even for professionals, the interface adds friction between intention and output. You know what you want. Getting there requires twenty clicks through nested menus.

The AI image generation wave (Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion) solved part of this by letting people describe what they want in text. But those tools generate static outputs. You get an image. If you want to change one thing about it, you regenerate the whole thing and hope the AI gets closer. That’s not editing. That’s gambling.

Canva simplified design for non-designers but capped out at templates and simple layouts. Figma is excellent for UI design but doesn’t handle photo editing, illustration, or animation. Runway is doing interesting AI-powered video editing. But nobody has taken a serious run at rebuilding the core Photoshop workflow around natural language and voice. That’s what Awen is attempting.

The Micro: “Draw Me a Mountain Lake. Now Make It Sunset.”

The pitch is straightforward. Instead of clicking through menus, you talk. “Draw me a Swiss mountain lake. Now make it sunset. Add a boat. Now animate it.” Each command builds on the previous state. The AI maintains context across a session, so you’re iterating on a composition, not starting from scratch each time.

Thibault Henriet, the founder, has an unusual background for a tech startup. He was Head of Operations France at Moda Operandi, the luxury fashion e-commerce platform. Before that, he worked as an assistant for contemporary artists across advertising, cinema, design, fashion, music, and publishing. He received an O1 visa in visual arts at 21, which means the U.S. government literally certified him as having extraordinary ability in the arts. He studied at Sciences Po Paris. The team includes co-founders Pablo (machine learning) and Antoine (software engineering). They came through YC’s Winter 2025 batch.

What I like about this founding story is that Thibault actually comes from the creative world. He’s not an engineer who thinks creatives need a better interface. He’s a creative who knows they do. That perspective difference matters when you’re designing a product that needs to feel intuitive to artists, not just technically impressive to developers.

The voice interface choice is interesting. Text input works fine at a desk. Voice works when your hands are on a drawing tablet, when you’re pacing around a studio, or when you’re brainstorming and want to externalize ideas faster than you can type. It’s not that voice is inherently better than text. It’s that voice is better for the specific context of creative work, where your hands are often busy.

The Verdict

I like the vision more than I trust the execution timeline. Rebuilding Photoshop is a decades-long project. Adobe has thousands of engineers maintaining millions of lines of code. The feature surface area is enormous. Awen isn’t going to achieve parity. They shouldn’t try.

The winning strategy is probably to nail one creative workflow end to end. Concept art for games. Mood boards for fashion. Social media content for brands. Pick one audience, make the voice-driven workflow so fast and natural for that use case that people switch despite the feature gap.

The competitive pressure is real. Adobe is adding its own AI features to Photoshop (Generative Fill, Generative Expand). Canva is integrating AI everywhere. Runway keeps shipping new models. All of these companies have distribution advantages that Awen doesn’t. But none of them are rethinking the interface from scratch. They’re bolting AI onto existing paradigms. Awen is starting with the paradigm itself.

At 30 days, I want to see a tight demo of one complete creative workflow done entirely by voice. Not a highlight reel of individual features, but a start-to-finish piece created conversationally. At 60 days, the question is whether professional creatives are using it for real client work or just playing with it on weekends. At 90 days, retention tells the story. Creative tools are habit-forming. If people switch back to Photoshop after the novelty wears off, the voice interface wasn’t enough. If they stay, Awen has found something real.