Joaquín Cuenca Abela

CEO & Founder @Magnific (formerly Freepik) • Ex @Google • Co-founder @BeSoccer_es (acq Livesport) • Founder Panoramio (acq by Google)

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

This is the biggest announcement I've made in the history of the company

In 2010 we started Freepik. Today, what we built has outgrown that name.

It's time we change that. We are Magnific

[Magnific @magnific]

Freepik is now Magnific

One platform to rewrite the rules of creativity

[TechHalla @techhalla]

I told you months ago that Spaces would change the game for AI creation.

And I guess I was right.

Now, Magnific just released Agents, MCP, and Flows. And it’s not just going to change the way you create, it’s going to completely shift how you collaborate with your team.

Because the real focus was never the agent.

It’s always been about the creatives, and that's where the real value is.

Joaquín Cuenca and Martin LeBlanc at the @upscaleconf

[Magnific @magnific]

Most AI agents are built to replace creatives, we built ours to stay by your side

For the first time, what Agents learn is shared across your team.
You direct, watch the process in real time, and edit it live

Agents + MCP + Flows, just launched at Upscale Conf SF

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

The Collector is back! Our favorite serie is back with a new
chapter 💜

[Kavan @Kavanthekid]

Chapter Two of Season One of the Magnific Original Series The Chronicles of Bone is HERE!!

This chapter holds a special place in my heart as we explore one of the most powerful forces in our world, love. It’s a theme that drives many of our characters, shaping their choices and pushing them toward both hope and destruction. It also happens to be the longest episode of Chronicles of Bone yet.

Created entirely with the tools inside @magnific Chapter Two takes us deeper into the realms and explores the price we pay in our search for peace.

Desmond Mordane ventures into the Dead Realm to hunt down the elusive Collector. After centuries spent searching for a way to return his wife from the dead, the Collector finally enjoys a brief life of peace at her side. Elsewhere, following his capture of Blackmere and the death of Vorin Mordane, King Arthur prepares his next move in the war against the Mordane Empire.

#thechroniclesofbone #cob #magnificoriginals

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@GABRIELxCxR @javilop @miriamgonp @DotCSV @antor Por lo que sé del caso (de segundas), su médico ha hecho un trabajo excelente. Entended esto como algo complementario

[World Labs @theworldlabs]

Designers don’t think in prompts. They think in shots, lighting, framing, and space.

@magnific's 3D Scenes uses Marble to turn a single image into a controllable 3D environment, giving creative teams control and consistency for campaign visuals.

Read the case study ↓

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

Learn more about 3D Scenes and give it a go!

https://t.co/cgvuH6dZ8m

[Magnific @magnific]

Your next 3D photo shoot will be done with AI

3D Scenes generates full environments from any image

→ Place your objects in the scene
→ Move the camera like a real shoot
→ Consistent lightning and detail across every angle

Available now on Freepik 👇

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

Building the future of creative technology requires two things: a clear vision of where the medium needs to go, and the right partners to get there.

When we started working on 3D Scenes, the hardest part wasn't the creative layer. It was the spatial foundation underneath it. Creative professionals don't think in prompts. They think in space, where the camera sits, where the light falls, where the object belongs. What they needed wasn't a better way to describe a scene but a way to build one.

Marble, built by the team at @theworldlabs, takes a single reference image and reconstructs it as a navigable 3D environment in seconds, with lighting and depth intact. That's the foundation 3D Scenes is built on.

The result is a workflow that didn't exist before: from a physical object, to a 3D model, to a composed scene, to a campaign-ready photograph. No 3D background required.

Thanks to @drfeifei and the entire World Labs team for building something worth building on. And to our team at @Magnific especially @agustin_prod , for making it real.

Read the full case study here
https://t.co/9x7dRuhesE

[Upscale Conf @upscaleconf]

Sci-fi noir. Post-apocalyptic westerns. Creature features

@kavanthekid makes AI films that look and feel like real genre cinema, built as full franchises, not one-off clips

At Upscale Conf SF, he's bringing The Chronicles of Bone to the big screen. Live screening of the latest episode, introduced on stage by Kavan

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@asciidiego @andupoto @viccpoes @carlesgelada Also @ideami

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@andupoto @viccpoes @asciidiego @antor @elisenda_bou @jaimebosch_ from VoiceMod

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@andupoto Follow @viccpoes and @asciidiego (both from bcn but now in sf), @antor @elisenda_bou

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@albertointernet Comprobar una prueba con Lean es sencillo y más fiable que cuando la comprueba un humano

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

Soon we will not prove any theorems “by hand”

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids.

An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.

This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.

[Magnific @magnific]

€10M for European marketing teams

The Magnific Fund takes you from using AI to leading with it

→ Magnific Business and credit top ups 30% off
→ A marketing playbook with real workflows
→ Ongoing training across your whole team

Open until June 30

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

What this team did that day was the culmination of months of intense work. Proud to see such an incredible effort, proving once more that they are Magnific

[Magnific @magnific]

This is what launch day actually looked like from the inside

April 28, 7:30 a.m. Málaga. The day Freepik became Magnific

→ 25K+ project hours
→ 72 language migrations
→ 14B+ redirected URLs

Once we started, there was no going back

To the team behind it: thank you

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@PJaccetturo we live in the future

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

I only backed up db and had code and all the settings in subversion (that was before git existed). I had a replica of the db on standby, and used that replica to make backups regularly.

Semi unrelated, but given that I’m down the memory lane… eventually I had to scale up the db for a few reasons: naive view counter on the images, geospatial searches, and a lot of traffic (all of google earth and maps users). A bit of context, that was when hard drives had a latency of 10ms, memcached was a fancy new thing (that I was using), Google had not yet created the S2 library, and Redis didn’t exist. After scaling up it to multiple replicas it was still failing under load.

I tried some “simple” solutions for the counter, like storing in memcache and flushing regularly to the db, but it was still not able to sync in time. I talked with the YouTube team on the phone, they had some solution where they store exactly until 301 views and then used another system that was more complex.

At the end I did my own thing radically simplifying the problem, I wrote a demon in C with a simple embedded http server using libuv (or libevent?). Our ids were dense and we had tens of millions of images, so you can already guess the solution: the api was backed by a simple statically allocated vector of ints, and that vector was mmap’d to a file. I made a thread only to flush the file to disk every second. It worked wonderfully, with only an issue during a migration (int32 != int64…). I solved the problem with the geosearches by having another demon that implemented a quad-tree over the photo locations.

Point is, eventually things became more complex, but those 2 demons were still a single C file each. They run in separate servers, but I could have run them on the same server. And you live in a different world today, SSDs are much faster, and you have many more options to stay simple. And you probably don’t have to serve the traffic of Google Maps and Google Earth…

Some people just want a complex architecture to look like the big companies, but most of the time that’s just bureaucracy. Really listen to @levelsio, he is spot on his decisions, and you can get very very far. If it gets more complicated, it’s easier to scale up when you have something simple that you understand

[metallicwander @metallicwander]

@cuenca @levelsio do you just backup the entire vps instead of just the db and vps separately? how do you handle failover? another hot instance on standby?

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@dump_tcp @levelsio I got a few issues with ovh, but not that common, probably due to my good long history with them. I tried Hetzner years ago when we had a surge in traffic, got blocked in under 2 hours, and I could not unblock it. New customer + big traffic is not a good combo

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

kudos to @levelsio for dropping simple and great tips, and 100% in agreement with his takes on “architecture.” Simple hosted server (I use OVH instead of Hetzner), straightforward php, html/css/js. Basic engineering will keep the cost of serving a page at 50ms if you do a good job on your db, and sqlite is a great choice. I always used mysql because that’s the one I started using 25 years ago and I got to know it pretty well, but sqlite is more attractive now with SSDs

[@levelsio @levelsio]

I laugh when I see people in holding their laptops half open so their Claude Code doesn't shut off

All my projects run on a @Hetzner_Online VPS with Claude Code installed next to the sites/apps that I work on and I just SSH in with @TermiusHQ and it keeps going forever even if I disconnect (I use Mosh or Tmux or I just /resume)

My MacBook Pro battery life is also much better as everything happens on the server not my laptop

I work so incredibly fast now, it's like having a secret benefit over everyone else who are still AI coding on a laptop, then deploying to their server, while their battery life dies and they can never close their laptop

And whenever I want I can just switch to Termius on my iPhone and continue working!

My workflow is literally: I have a bug or feature, I open Termius, I type it in the project tab, it fixes it, every fix it auto commits to GitHub but it doesn't actually deploy from there anymore because it's editing the site on the server live

I don't recommend that to everyone, but I do recommend getting a VPS you can code from and then use as staging and test and deploy from there to your production server

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

@versvs @levelsio Nowadays you can just stay on sqlite. The latency will be MUCH lower than mysql and disks have latencies under 100𝜇s. You only need to move to mysql/postgress if you need multiple servers, but you have to get really big before you need that

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela @cuenca]

my first startup (Panoramio) started as a single php file in an ovh server. I had to scale up to multiple servers because of all the requests to serve the images for Google Earth and at the time hard drives had a latency of 10ms. Then as it grew I decided to structure it and it became a 2 files project, index.php and db.php, using jquery on the front. That’s when Google acquired it in 2007. I was always a bit ashamed I didn’t do a “proper architecture.” Today in Magnific our team prefers tailwind / laravel, but I can’t get my head around that. I guess I’m old or something, but if I was to start again I 100% would use simple html/css/php/db