Adobe has launched Adobe for Startups, a program aimed at giving early-stage founders access to the company’s creative, productivity and marketing tools for free in their first year.
Eligible startups get 12 months of free access to three products: Firefly Pro Plus (Adobe’s AI creative suite for images, video and audio, including Photoshop on web and mobile), Acrobat Studio (which bundles Adobe’s PDF tools, an AI assistant and Adobe Express for documents, presentations and e-signatures), and Semrush (for tracking how a business is being discovered online, including through AI-powered search).
The pitch is aimed squarely at the reality of running an early-stage business: founders doing design, website-building, campaigns and customer discovery all at once, usually without a dedicated marketing hire. Each of those touchpoints, Adobe argues, shapes how investors, partners and customers perceive the company before it has the resources to hire specialists for any of it.
Who qualifies
To be eligible, a startup needs to have been founded within the last five years and raised less than $15 million in funding. Adobe verifies eligibility during the application process. Importantly, the release also notes that “program terms, eligibility criteria and country availability apply,” without specifying which countries are included. Australian founders interested in applying should check the application page directly to confirm local availability before assuming they qualify.
A handful of current Adobe customers are quoted backing the program. Aman Johar, Co-Founder and CEO of DataCurve, a fan data platform for sports and entertainment organisations, says the company already uses Adobe Firefly for creative assets and sees an opportunity to combine that with its own audience intelligence tools. Jared Kleinstein, Founder and CEO of Gondola, a digital credit platform for the content creator industry, says Adobe’s tools have been part of how the company operates since its earliest days. Anastasia Zaporozhtseva, a Data Specialist at speech AI research lab Oruk, says the company plans to use Adobe Express specifically to turn its research into visual demos developers can understand quickly.
What’s on offer beyond the software
Alongside the free tools, the program includes workshops and events intended to connect founders with Adobe’s own experts and with each other. One is scheduled for 3 December, a “Brand on Demand” session run with Artist and the Machine, where participants build a week’s worth of on-brand marketing content in real time using Adobe’s AI tools.
Adobe is also running a hub for the program at Adobe MAX in Miami, from 10 to 12 November, for founders attending in person.