Arcade Welcomes Varun Jampani as AI Chief to Build the Next Era of AI Creation and Commerce

Co-creator of Stable Diffusion 3.5, DreamBooth, Stable Virtual Camera and former VP of Research at Stability AI joins the world's first platform uniting AI creation, community, and commerce in the physical world.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Arcade (www.arcade.ai), the world's first AI physical product creation platform that empowers anyone to create, shop, and shape the physical world, today announced that Varun Jampani, the co-creator of Stable Diffusion 3.5, DreamBooth, and global leader in generative vision, has joined as Chief AI Officer.

Arcade is pioneering a new category of AI-native physical creation and commerce, enabling anyone, anywhere, to design, purchase, and sell custom, manufacturable products using natural language and generative AI. Arcade is building the bridge between the digital and physical worlds, where shopping, self-expression, and making are unified by AI. By connecting the world's ideas with a global network of artisans and makers, Arcade is democratizing creation, unlocking human creative potential, and redefining what's possible for individuals and communities everywhere.

Jampani is recognized as one of the most influential researchers in computer vision and generative modeling. As VP of Research at Stability AI, he led the development of foundational models for image, video, and 3D generation, including Stable Diffusion 3.5, a foundational model that is widely used globally. He is also a co-author of DreamBooth, which allowed AI to internalize new concepts – such as animals or people – and render them in infinite scenes and styles from only a few examples, along with Stable Virtual Camera, Stable Video Diffusion 4D, Stable Fast 3D, among others. Prior to Stability AI, Jampani held research roles at Google and NVIDIA, where his work has consistently pushed the boundaries of what AI can perceive and generate, bridging 2D and 3D worlds, and enabling machines to understand geometry, lighting, and material properties from real-world imagery with downstream impact across AR/VR, robotics, graphics, simulation, and content creation.

"Arcade represents an exciting application of generative AI technology, allowing consumers to buy physical products as easily as generating an image," said Jampani. "I'm incredibly excited to join Arcade and Mariam to help lead this revolution and unleash human creativity at a scale the world has never seen."

"Varun's work transformed generative vision from a research breakthrough into something hundreds of millions of people actively use every day," said Mariam Naficy, founder and CEO of Arcade and ecommerce pioneer who founded and scaled Minted, the crowdsourcing design marketplace. "Now, Varun will help Arcade build the infrastructure for a fundamentally new kind of commerce — one where the power to create and sell is truly universal — and a new era where taste, creativity, and community converge more powerfully than ever before to shape commerce."

Reid Hoffman, Arcade investor and cofounder of LinkedIn, added: "Varun's decision to join Arcade as Chief AI Officer speaks to both the technical ambition and world-changing potential of what Arcade is building. This is the team to define the future of commerce."

At Arcade, Jampani will oversee AI research and development, advancing the platform's ability to translate natural language into physical products across categories ranging from home goods to fashion. His deep expertise in all image, video and 3D visual modalities will accelerate Arcade's vision to create a new relationship between dreams and reality, where the exact product a consumer wants can be understood, visualized, priced and bought instantly.

About Arcade

Arcade is building the world's first AI physical product creation platform, where imagination becomes reality. Our platform lets anyone design, purchase, and sell custom, manufacturable products using natural language and generative AI. We believe everyone should have the power to create physical goods as easily as they post online, and we're building the infrastructure to make that real.

Arcade has raised $42M from a world-class group of investors, including Reid Hoffman, Canaan Partners (Laura Chau), Forerunner Ventures (Kirsten Green), Offline Ventures (Brit Morin), Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), Inspired Capital (Alexa von Tobel), Adverb Ventures (April Underwood), Factorial Funds (Sol Bier), and Torch Capital (Jonathan Keidan). Our angel investors include Elad Gil, Ev Williams, Marissa Mayer, Sara Beykpour, Kayvon Beykpour, Anna Veronika Dorogush, Eugenia Kuyda, David Luan, Sharon Zhou, Kelly Wearstler, Karlie Kloss, Colin Kaepernick, Christy Turlington Burns, and Jeff Wilke.

Arcade is headquartered in San Francisco's Presidio and led by serial entrepreneur Mariam Naficy (Minted, Eve), and a founding team with deep experience in generative AI, design systems, and supply chain. We're pioneering a new category at the intersection of AI, personal expression, and on-demand manufacturing, and we're building fast.

Media Contact:
Kirsten Underwood
[email protected]

SOURCE Arcade