Krea, the San Francisco company that has built a 35-million-user creative platform around its own image models, today released Krea 3, an image editing model designed for high-volume commercial work. On CPI-Bench, an Alibaba Group benchmark for real-world editing tasks, the Ultra tier scores 4.81 out of 5, placing it second only to OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 and ahead of GPT Image 2, Seedream 5 Pro, and Nano Banana.
What makes Krea 3 different from most editing models is speed. An edit at 2K resolution completes in under 8 seconds end-to-end. Krea claims that's 10 times faster than GPT Image 2 and 4 times faster than Nano Banana Pro. Pricing sits at $0.03 per 1K image and $0.06 per 2K image.
LoRA Training for Products and People
The bigger shift is what Krea calls "the first edit model you can train on a specific product or person." LoRA fine-tuning lets teams lock in a character, a product, or a visual style so results stay consistent across an entire campaign. That matters for e-commerce catalogs and advertising series where a single hero product needs to appear in dozens of scenes without drifting.
"Editing models are already used across e-commerce, film and advertising, but they've been held back by speed," said Víctor Perez, co-founder and CEO. "When an edit takes seconds, creatives can stop rationing their ideas and start exploring them."
Krea 3 also accepts up to six reference images per edit, supports native 2K output with 4K for print work, and offers bounding boxes for precise placement of elements within the frame.
Early Customers and Distribution
Pixelcut, an AI product photography platform used by more than 70 million creators, has been testing Krea 3 since early checkpoints. "The product shots look like they were lit by a professional photographer, not generated by AI," said Dominique Yahyavi, co-founder and CEO. "Most of our customers are small businesses that can't afford a studio shoot for every product."
Doodles, the Web3 entertainment company that launched its own AI model earlier this year for animated film production, is also among the initial users.
Krea says one in three Fortune 500 companies now use its platform. The company has raised over $80 million from investors including Bain Capital Ventures and a16z. Justine Moore, a partner at a16z who focuses on AI and has helped lead the firm's investment in Krea, framed the release in terms of workflow: "When a top-quality edit comes back fast enough to try the next idea right away, the model stops being a step in the workflow and becomes the workflow."
Krea 3 is available now on krea.ai, via the Krea API, and through distribution partners including fal, Hedra, Together AI, Nous Research, OpenRouter, Baseten, and Replicate. Enterprise customers can request access through Krea Partnerships.
For teams building creative tools from scratch or running AI-driven workflows at scale, the speed-versus-quality tradeoff has long been the constraint. Whether Krea 3 actually resolves it depends on how the benchmark numbers translate to real production pipelines.
