Tomorrow, November 20, our Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025which you can follow from our website. In them we will reward the most important devices and technologies of this year and for the first time we will present the special Xataka Award to the best Spanish technology company.
The winner is Freepik, the Malaga company that has gone from being a bank of images and graphic resources to competing directly with Adobe and Figma. Omar Pera, its CPO, will accompany us during the gala.
The pivotal moment: when DALL-E 2 changed everything
Founded in 2010 in Malaga as a simple search engine for free images, Freepik served millions of users with a simple business model: facilitating access to graphic resources. “We started the company because we were making web pages and it took us a long time to find the image we wanted,” its CEO, Joaquín Cuenca, explained to us in an interview at the beginning of the year.
The launch of DALL-E 2 in 2022 It was the turning point. Cuenca’s first reaction was visceral: “This makes what we are doing obsolete.” But he quickly came to a more important conclusion: “I saw him as unstoppable.” There was no debate about whether generative AI would transform their industry, but rather how to respond.
The company went from marketplace from static content to develop your own video generation, editing and production tools. And the impact has been brutal: “Almost 50% of new subscribers, their first action is to do something with AI. A year and three months ago it was 0%,” Cuenca told us in February. “And more than 50% of existing subscribers are already using AI on Freepik.”
Today Freepik serves more than 150 million monthly users with a complete ecosystem of tools: Freepik, Flaticon, Slidesgo, Wepik and Magnific AI. They already exceed 800,000 paid subscriptions.
Own technology to avoid lawsuits
Freepik developed F Liteits generative model trained exclusively with 80 million of its own commercially licensed images. It is a strategic bet to avoid the lawsuits that companies like Midjourney and OpenAI are having to face. Solid legal ground as a competitive advantage.
Magnificenta Murcia startup purchased in 2024, went viral for its ability to increase the resolution of images without distorting details. Mysticits star model, competes with Ideogram and Midjourney. Regarding the latter, Cuenca is clear: “We have a lot of respect for Midjourney,” but he considers that Freepik is superior in adherence to the prompt because “Midjourney takes a lot of artistic license.”
They are also clear about their position regarding OpenAI. For Cuenca, DALL-E “was a diversion from OpenAI”: “If you have the possibility of getting the best language model in the world in your company, everything else is a distraction. With that potential, starting to make images makes no sense.” It is precisely that distraction from the giants that opened a window of opportunity.
The stone in the shoe
Freepik’s commitment is to build an all-in-one platform instead of forcing the use of different applications: generation with several models, video with Google I see 3 (they became the first in the world to integrate Veo), complete editing, audio, conversion to SVG…
“AI is very well aligned with what we want to do, and in fact helps us expand the catalog of things that we can solve for the user,” explains Cuenca. They no longer compete as much with Getty or Shutterstock as with Adobe and company.
Video is the next frontier. “The video is now where the image was in 2023,” Cuenca told us. It still requires many iterations to achieve the desired result, but the room for improvement is enormous.
Democratization from Malaga, without complexes
Freepik believes that AI democratizes the creation of visual content, allowing businesses of any size to produce more engaging material without the need for large budgets or specialized equipment.
And he does it from Malaga, without complexes. Although it has an office in San Francisco, its center of gravity remains in Andalusia. “From Malaga to Madrid is nothing, it’s two hours or so,” explains Cuenca, who considers that the real problem of Spanish entrepreneurship is not location: “We lack people who have good ideas, that is the main brake.”
Freepik competes globally from there. It is one of the great successes of Spanish technology, and without a doubt the greatest national reference in generative AI.
In just two years, Freepik completely reinvented itself: from distributor to developer, from marketplace to ecosystem, freemium An essential subscription for hundreds of thousands of creative professionals. A transformation that makes it worthy of the first special Xataka Award for the best Spanish technology company.
Featured image | Xataka
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