Verse, a new AI-powered creative app, aims to empower Gen Z users to create hyper-visual, expressive content. The iOS app allows users to design and publish multimedia content on an interactive canvas with the help of an AI assistant.
It allows users to create mini-websites called Verses that can feature mood boards, greeting cards, invitations, storefronts, fan pages, blogs, etc. Verses also provide content creators and influencers with a creative way to connect and share with their audience through a link-in-bio format.
Verse was founded by Bobby Pinkney, a former management consultant at PwC, and Michelle Yin, a former engineer at Meta. The two met in college and previously founded Discz, a YC-backed music discovery app that now has more than 1.5 million users.
Pinkney and Yin came up with the idea for Verse while developing Discz. He had added a profile feature to the app where users could drag and drop songs and images. He added it to help people express the music they liked, but he realized people were also using it as a creative tool.
“We thought this would be a way for people to express who I am and what music I like, but it turned out to be an option for users,” Pinkney told TechCrunch. “We were just blown away because this was totally unexpected. We were like, this is a music app, we gave users a profile, and now they're literally using our platform to create media and share it elsewhere.”
Image credit: Verse
After that, the two decided to create Verses. The platform launched publicly on iOS in June, and since then, users have created over 200,000 Verses.
While today's popular design and publishing platforms like Canva and Wix are static and somewhat template-based, Verse offers a scrollable, multimodal canvas where you can add all kinds of elements to your creations: photos, stickers, videos, links, GIFs, text, backgrounds, songs, and more. You can also link one Verse within another.
The platform's AI assistant guides you through the entire process, from design to publishing, powered by LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta's Llama, and Mistral.
“We basically took all of this very complex technology, like publishing and design, and made it accessible directly from your phone, and yet incredibly simple to use,” Yin says.
Once you've created your Verse, you can publish it and share it across social media as a mini website.
“Self-expression is a very common use case,” Pinkney says. “Not everyone wants to stand in front of a camera and make a TikTok, right? So there are a lot of people who don't want to make, say, TikToks, but who want to express themselves and share their interests and hobbies and information. So this is a creative medium for them to express that.”
Image credit: Verse
Verse is not only used by everyday users to express themselves, but also a way for artists and businesses to create immersive content for their brands.
For example, British singer-songwriter Kenya Grace created a verse to celebrate the release of her EP, which included a link to her new single, a list of tour dates and where to buy tickets, links to her social media, an image of herself, etc. Additionally, hard seltzer company Lunar created a verse on their Instagram profile to promote their various products and link to where users can buy them.
Although Verse is primarily a design platform, it also has a social side: you can browse verses created by others on a variety of topics, including trends, featured, music, lifestyle, art, movies, games, and more. If you find a verse you like, you can leave a comment.
The app is free to use, but the company may consider a subscription model in the future.
In the future, Verse plans to release an Android app and, in response to growing demand from marketing teams who want to create their own branded experiences on the web, a way for users to create Verses on the web as well.