Design Communication, Reimagined: The Story Behind Vivify

“Can you make that blue a little warmer?”

Every designer has fielded some version of this request—and watched an entire afternoon vanish trying to pin down an exact hue using inefficient words.

Modern design tools are miracles of craft, yet the communication layer surrounding them forces creators into constant multi-platform transitions. This juggling act wastes more than $50 billion in productivity every year, causes project delays, and leads to the emotional exhaustion that makes current methods unsustainable.

Vivify exists because our founder experienced this pain firsthand and saw a better way – a future of communication built on a visual language, housed within an all-in-one platform for creative collaboration.

The Spark: Scaling Attention for Creators

Vivify’s story starts with our CEO, Uma Kelkar. As a top international urban sketching faculty, she directly faced the challenge of scaling her ability to provide nuanced, visual feedback. She realized the bottleneck wasn’t skill, but attention, and the lack of tools for efficient visual communication. Vivify’s earliest prototype was built specifically to solve Uma’s scalability issues – she is truly User Zero .

Her insights extend far beyond her own experience. Uma led strategy for Urban Sketchers, the world’s largest sketching community, guiding its growth to over 350,000 members across 300+ global chapters. This deep immersion within a community having strong overlaps with product designers, interior designers, architects, animators, and illustrators gave her unparalleled, firsthand understanding of the universal communication friction limiting creators everywhere. This connection reinforces our commitment to building a platform centered on trust, recognizing that protecting creators' valuable intellectual property is fundamental.

Bringing the deep technical expertise to address this challenge is our CTO, Gabriel Zaccak. Complementing Uma’s vision, Gabriel’s foundational work on agentic UX and agents at MIT CSAIL (2007 - see his thesis proposal), combined with 8 recent years leading R&D and deploying production ML systems serving millions, provides the crucial capability to build the sophisticated, scalable AI needed.

Our Solution: An All-in-One Visual Collaboration Hub

Driven by these insights, Vivify is an all-in-one platform centralizing communication for creative projects. We introduce copilots for natural, intuitive, visually-assisted communication within a unified workspace, aiming to unlock tacit knowledge and simplify nuanced expression.

Within Vivify’s secure project pods, you can seamlessly manage:

• Rich messaging centered around visuals.
• Direct, contextual annotation and feedback on any image (mock-ups, sketches, renders).
• AI-powered understanding (our visual copilot gets “warmer blue”).
• Integrated project meetings and reports.

This consolidation lets creators focus on creativity, preserves context, enhances security, and eliminates tool fatigue. The impact is tangible:

• 3× faster iteration cycles.
• Validation of 10× income potential for top creators compared to earnings on platforms like Patreon, Domestika, or Skillshare.
• Improved stakeholder clarity and satisfaction.

See Vivify in Action:

Example: Providing instant, contextual feedback.

Example: Streamlining the creative workflow.

The Right Team for the Challenge

Vivify thrives on the unique synergy between our founders. We combine Uma’s deep, firsthand understanding of creator challenges and strategic market access derived from leading massive, relevant communities, with Gabriel’s cutting-edge technical expertise, honed from foundational MIT research through to deploying complex AI solutions at scale.

This fusion of authentic user perspective and world-class engineering capability makes us uniquely positioned to redefine visual communication for creatives.

Our Approach: Empowering Designers, Integrating Seamlessly

Initially focusing on designers, Vivify’s integrated platform empowers autonomy and enhances scalability by becoming the central, secure communication hub for projects, eliminating friction rather than just integrating with other tools.

The Road Ahead: Join the Visual Conversation

We believe the future of creative communication lies in a richer visual language within a unified, intelligent platform. Vivify is building that future.

If you’ve ever felt limited by words or lost hours navigating fragmented tools, Vivify is being built for you.

Stay connected as we share more about the evolving landscape of visual communication. Want to learn more or discuss your specific challenges? Email us at info@vivify.ai.