Grant Davis

Grant Davis founded Wand, an AI drawing tool that lets artists guide image generation through sketches and iterative visual edits. On February 12, 2026, he announced that Wand was being acquired by Krea and that he had joined as Head of Product with the Wand team. His stated priority was to help artists and designers realize ambitious projects without compromising their vision.[2][1][3]

Davis described Krea as sharing Wand’s mission and called for “tasteful, controllable models working in tandem with interfaces that go beyond the prompt box and reward artistic skill + vision.” Krea’s announcement accompanying his post introduced an iPad app combining custom brushes, a native iOS interface and real-time AI.[3]

Davis coauthored Draw This First with Dazhi Zhong and Rowan Bradbury, released as an arXiv preprint on August 12, 2026. Their system generates ordered vector sketches from text or converts an image into ordered vector strokes, with language instructions specifying what to draw first. Rather than generating strokes sequentially, it encodes drawing order as color in an intermediate image. An adapted Qwen-Image-Edit-2509 generator produces that representation; a trained VAE decoder predicts an order field, a stroke mask and stroke segmentation. The system converts the recovered strokes into polylines and sorts them by the predicted field.[6]

The authors report training with 47,318 drawings commissioned from 50 artists on Upwork. Their evaluations found stronger control over the order of broad regions than over finer parts or repeated passes. The output supports replaying vector strokes, but does not recover the full drawing performance: recorded time, pressure, tilt and brush width are omitted, and recovered strokes can fragment into multiple paths. Without order instructions, the authors report no verifiable human-like global drawing-order prior.[6]

Before the Krea appointment and drawing-order research, Davis’s work at Wand centered on visual guidance and personalization. O’Shaughnessy Ventures’ March 2023 founder biography dates Wand’s founding to the start of 2022 and says Davis had explored generative AI for creative tools since 2016, inspired by Deep Dream, Neural Style Transfer and pix2pix. Davis also founded Muze, a freeform messenger designed for expressive, playful conversation.[2]

Wand emphasized illustration as a way to guide models such as Stable Diffusion. Its early personalization workflow let artists upload portfolio images to fine-tune private models for their own style. The tool focused on ideation and exploration, including shared mood boards and collaborative model training.[2]

Davis demonstrated that interaction at the NYC AI×UX meetup described in Paul Butler’s June 1, 2023 recap. Butler reported that Wand felt like an iPad drawing app: users could turn a rough sketch into concept art, then continue adding features after stylization. He called it “one of the cleanest interfaces I’ve seen for tight collaboration between the user and a generative AI.” The demonstration made the iterative drawing-and-rendering loop concrete.[1]