The spark behind Kartel

Kartel began when co-founders Ben Kusin and Luke Peterson each saw from different perspectives that AI would transform creative work. Ben had launched one of the earliest AI-only consultancies in 2022 and quickly recognized AI’s power to remove barriers in creative fields. At the same time, Luke was working in spatial computing—AR, VR, and 3D media—where early multimodal AI experiments convinced him this was the future.

The two met by chance at an Easter party, introduced by a mutual friend as “the only two friends here in AI.” They began collaborating with a small, highly advanced community of ComfyUI-focused multimodal builders who were chaining multiple models into intricate workflows that outperformed off-the-shelf tools. That community became the nucleus of what they now call creative engineering, and the foundation for Kartel’s growth.

From initial idea to product-market fit

Ben and Luke’s early vision was a marketplace connecting businesses that needed high-end AI-powered creative with the talent that could deliver it. As soon as they launched, most inbound demand sounded the same: “This is great, but I have no idea what I’m doing—can you just do it for me?” pulling Kartel into white‑label services where the team delivered full AI‑powered creative solutions. They soon realized they were repeatedly building reusable workflows and custom models that clients needed to own, leading to their current focus on enterprise‑grade “engines” embedded in a brand’s creative stack—what they describe as a “Palantir for the creative suite.”

Enter Kevin Reilly

Kartel’s current chapter began when Luke invited longtime friend and media veteran Kevin Reilly to see what the team was building. Kevin had spent his 35-year career effectively acting as a VC in the creative IP space—building entertainment brands and backing creators behind shows like The Office, The Sopranos, ER, Rick and Morty, 30 Rock, and Friday Night Lights. He immediately saw Kartel’s product‑market fit and initially came on as an investor, but after a few visits he decided to join as CEO, a decision he says took him “about three seconds.”

Life on the AI frontier

Building Kartel has required a level of focus that borders on obsessive. Ben describes founding in this era as requiring “a little bit of masochism” and complete immersion. He says you cannot dip your toe into AI, because the landscape changes too quickly. Focus on a single mission is now a necessity, not a luxury. He’s lived through the first dot‑com boom, crypto, and other hype cycles, and calls AI categorically different—closer to electricity in its transformative potential than to any prior tech wave.​

That intensity shows up in the team’s day-to-day. Luke jokes that he “used to be healthy and fit” before deciding to sacrifice everything else to build Kartel, but he is only half kidding; the team sees itself, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as standing on “the five‑yard line of the last game ever to be played” as AI accelerates toward AGI and beyond.

Closing the gap between AI assumptions and reality

The biggest challenge so far has been education: most people’s mental model of AI comes from chatbots, and they underestimate both the complexity and the limits of real-world creative workflows. Kartel has had to show that AI may only get a brand 70% of the way, with the remaining 30% still demanding human story, nuance, and skill. The market itself is uneven, with some brands overconfident in partial knowledge and others paralyzed by uncertainty, so the team spends significant time reframing AI as infrastructure that can be woven into existing processes and skillsets.

Lessons for early-stage founders

Kevin believes great creators and founders blend curiosity and resilience into a balanced openness to feedback—neither so closed-off they ignore useful input, nor so malleable they’re derailed by every opinion. He urges founders not to get defensive, since even if five points miss, one insight can still make you better; when you’re ground down by second‑guessing, step back, but when you’re strongest, be most curious and use criticism as fuel to improve your product.​

The Kartel team also emphasizes focus. In a world where founders are asked to “quadruple‑task,” they try to narrow attention to one priority at a time and reject the myth of raising on an idea alone—today, real traction, real product, and visible progress speak far louder than any pitch deck.

What's next for Kartel

Kartel’s founders progressed quickly from the “crawling” phase of intense learning to the “walking” phase of rapid pivots from marketplace to services to reusable enterprise engines with a growing client roster, a sharper thesis, and a team operating at high velocity. Today, they see an equally exciting quick transition to the “running” phase: winning more business, scaling their creative engines across divisions and regions, and building a challenger brand that moves faster and more precisely than large platforms or consultancies.