Kosmik

Kosmik is a visual workspace for creatives, part canvas, part moodboard, part browser. It gives you a quiet space to gather thoughts, save links, drop in images, and make sense of things. And when you add something, Kosmik can pull in related content from the web, making it less about storage and more about staying inspired.

Get to know Kosmik

Hey, I’m Paul – co-founder and designer of Kosmik. My path into tech started unusually early. I was eight when my uncle handed me an old Atari computer from the 1980s. It only booted in BASIC, so if you wanted it to do anything, you had to program it yourself. That’s when I had this realization – a computer could open directly into a world of creation, not just consumption. That idea never left me.

I grew up fascinated by computing history. At 12, I joined a French nonprofit trying to build the equivalent of the Computer History Museum. I got to experiment with old machines, learn electronics, and explore early hypertext systems like HyperCard and Canon CAT. Those tools didn’t care about apps or folders. They were fluid, adaptable, more like creative instruments than rigid software.

Later, I studied philosophy, worked as an assistant director in a small film studio, and felt first-hand how poorly computers handled real-world creative workflows. Everything was disconnected: renaming files, converting formats, jumping between tools just to get one thing done. I kept thinking, what if there was one surface that let you do it all?

In 2018, we started sketching that idea into reality. I built the first version of Kosmik as a native iPad app. It was raw but promising. My boss at the time believed in it enough to seed the company and give me space to build. Then I met my co-founder, who brought the technical backbone. We rebuilt it, expanded to Mac and web, learned the hard way where to focus, and finally, after a full rewrite, Kosmik became what we always hoped it would be.

What’s Kosmik and what’s so cool about it?

Kosmik is a visual workspace for creatives – a hybrid between an infinite canvas, a browser, a file system, and a moodboard. It was born out of frustration with the way computers silo your work. Instead of hopping between Figma, Pinterest, Finder, and dozens of Chrome tabs, Kosmik gives you one fluid space to gather, organize, and build ideas.

At its heart, Kosmik is for people who collect more than they create: art directors, interior designers, product teams, researchers. Anyone constantly curating references, visuals, and inspiration. Traditional moodboarding tools treat that process as a one-time step. We see it as a living layer of your work you return to, reshape, and grow.

What makes it special? You can drag in anything: PDFs, videos, websites, images, bookmarks, and it just works. Drop your messy downloads folder into the canvas, click “organize by themes,” and Kosmik uses AI to cluster, tag, and lay it all out beautifully. Want more inspiration? Select a few pieces and Kosmik will find similar content across the web tailored to your context.

We’re not interested in “second brain” systems or productivity hacks. Kosmik is more like a creative dumping ground that grows and evolves with you. A digital commonplace book where everything has a place, but nothing needs to be overthought.

We’re not building productivity software. We’re building a thinking environment. One that feels creative, expansive, and deeply personal. The way software used to feel, before it started telling you how to work.

Tool Stack of Kosmik

We started in Swift, but eventually rebuilt everything from scratch in TypeScript. Today, Kosmik runs on Electron with a backend powered by InstantDB. That switch gave us the flexibility to launch across platforms and build the features we actually wanted, without the limitations of earlier tech choices.

We use Radix components for UI, and we even built our own icon system called Spectrum, which helps with asset management. LLM-powered features run through Gemini because of its massive context window – key for passing huge canvases filled with hundreds of images or PDFs. We tried other models, but none could handle that scale.

On the ops side, our devs work with GitLab, and everyone’s free to use their preferred editor: VS Code, WebStorm, whatever fits. Everything’s self-hosted: Rocket Chat, GitLab, the build pipeline. It keeps things tight and in our control.

TypeScript: Strongly typed programming language that builds on JavaScript

Electron: Framework designed to create desktop apps using web technologies

InstantDB: Database powering real-time sync and backend logic

Radix UI: Open-source component library

Gemini: Personal AI assistant by Google

GitLab: Version control and CI platform

VS Code: Integrated development environment

WebStorm: JavaScript and TypeScript IDE by JetBrains

Rocket Chat: Open-source fully customizable communications platform

Anything else you’d like to share?

We’ve got something big coming soon: AI-powered search that browses the web for you. It’s one of our most ambitious features yet. Think of it as a contextual browser that brings back answers instead of links.

We want Kosmik to be the kind of tool that gives you time back. Not to generate for you, but to support your thinking. AI should feel like a computer that uses the computer, not one that replaces the human.

We’re excited about where it’s all going. And we’re still small, still shipping fast, still listening to every user.

Go try it, we think you’ll feel the difference!

Now, discover Kosmik for yourself

Huge thanks to Paul for sharing the story behind Kosmik and the details on the building blocks that make it such a great tool for finding and collecting ideas. Now go test it out yourself and get inspired.

Kosmik updates

Noteworthy updates to Kosmik since this story went live.

Dec 15, 2025
Kosmik goes out of beta and launches paid plans

Kosmik, a beautifully designed moodboard-meets-browser app built for creatives, is now out of beta. Paul, one of the co-founders, was kind enough to share a 40% off code for the first month of Kosmik Pro for App Stacks readers 〰️ APPSTACKS40.

Jul 16, 2025
Story released.