The Future of Cosmos

For all of my life, I’ve thought in images.

The most compact and universal form of communication. A way of seeing the world, captured inside a neat, portable frame.

Images shape what we want, how we see ourselves, and what we believe is possible.

There was a time when the internet understood that. When collecting images felt expressive instead of compulsive. When inspiration wasn’t optimized for outrage or dopamine, but for curiosity. Tumblr was the first place I felt it. And once you’ve felt it, you notice when it disappears.

Over the last decade, that feeling slowly eroded. The internet got louder. Flatter. Everything started to feel repackaged. Images became content. Inspiration became noise. Humans became data. Even my own imagination started to feel a little house-trained. As a creative, I believe you’re only as good as your source material. Inputs become outputs. You are what you see. Slop in, slop out. Quality in, quality out.

After selling my last company and spending a few years at Squarespace, I found myself back in deeply personal creative work — starting a furniture gallery, designing my own space, developing a hospitality brand with a friend. My visual references were all over the place: saved posts on Instagram, screenshots in folders, images buried in my camera roll. Nothing lived together. Nothing had context. Nothing felt intentional.

So I built Cosmos as a side project, alongside Luca Marra — a living archive for my visual brain. A place where I could save anything, from anywhere, and trust I’d actually be able to return to it later.

When I shared it with a few creative friends, the reaction was: “Great. Now I can finally stop using my burner Pinterest account.”

I thought it was odd. And then it kept happening. Designers. Art directors. Architects. Photographers. People with great taste were using tools that didn’t reflect their standards, their craft, or their values.

I also kept hearing something else. Creatives were tired of seeing their work circulate without credit.

Over time, visual culture lost its center. Images were everywhere, but there was nowhere they actually belonged. So we decided to give them a home.

We raised a $6M seed round from GV and Accel, and launched Cosmos publicly last summer. In just over a year, it’s grown primarily through word of mouth to millions of users.

Today, people save over 10 million images a month on Cosmos. It’s been featured in Apple’s 25 Apps for 2025 and reached #1 in the App Store’s Design category in 28 countries.

Nearly every creative team we talk to either uses Cosmos, or knows someone who does. It’s not just something they use. It’s somewhere they go.

And more and more, it’s not just for people with “creative” in their title.

That widening audience pushed us to rethink Cosmos from the ground up — and today we’re releasing updates that point to the Cosmos we’re building toward.

Cosmos isn’t just a tool. It’s a place.

A More Connected Cosmos

Over the last year, we’ve been rethinking how images should live online, how taste should be expressed, and how inspiration should spread.

1. A profile that reflects your taste

Previously, every saved image had to be organized into a “cluster.” It worked well for some people, but it made saving feel like a decision instead of an instinct — asking you to explain why you liked something before you could simply keep it.

Now, saving is instant. One tap, and an image lives on your profile. Over time, your feed becomes a clear picture of what you’re into. Nine saves, and your aesthetic takes shape. Clusters still exist, but saving now starts on your profile.

2. A social graph built for discovery

Creativity is a collective act. We’re introducing a new following feed and better ways to stumble into the worlds of people who inspire you — friends, artists, designers, tastemakers. It’s social, but intentional. Less performing, more wandering.

3. Restoring credit and context to images

One of the biggest problems in visual culture is how quickly images lose their provenance. The moment something gets reposted, credit disappears and context gets stripped away.

So we built a system that researches every image on Cosmos across the web and synthesizes the findings into a caption: who created it, what it depicts, where it was published, when it came out, and its cultural lineage.

Creators deserve attribution.

People deserve context.

And inspiration deserves roots.

This has become one of my favorite parts of Cosmos.

$15M to Build What’s Next

To build what comes next we’ve raised a $15M Series A co-led by Shine Capital and Matrix, with participation from GV, Accel, Plug and Play, and Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace. Ethan Daly from Shine has joined our board.

They believe, as we do, that inspiration is a deeply human privilege worth protecting — and that the environments we spend time in shape who we become.

Cosmos is what I’ve been building towards my whole life. A place for people who treat inspiration as a living, breathing practice. Something you return to. Something that compounds.

It’s for anyone chasing the spark, and for anyone who misses it.

For anyone who’s still looking.

— Andy