Adobe
Adobe makes creative software and develops the Firefly family of generative models. Its company history began with digital printing in 1982. Firefly arrived in 2023, initially for images and text effects, before expanding into other media.
Company & leadership
- Current CEO
- Shantanu Narayen, as of 7 November 2026. He became CEO in 2007.
- Announced succession
- Anil Chakravarthy is due to become president and CEO on 1 December 2026. Narayen is due to become executive chair.
- Initial public offering
- 20 August 1986.
- Legal history
- Incorporated in California in October 1983; reincorporated in Delaware in May 1997.
Founders
- John Warnock and Charles (Chuck) Geschke.
Adobe began with a way to print digital pages
Warnock and Geschke were colleagues at Xerox before founding Adobe. Their first product was PostScript, which described text and images for printing. Geschke later served as president until 2000 and shared the board chair role with Warnock until 2017. The founders’ technical work came before the image-editing and subscription products now associated with the company.
The founding and incorporation dates are different. Adobe gives December 1982 as its start, October 1983 for California incorporation, and May 1997 for reincorporation in Delaware. Its 1986 stock-market listing also predates Firefly by decades.
The next CEO has been named, but the change is not yet effective
Narayen joined Adobe in 1998, became president and chief operating officer in 2005, and became CEO in 2007. His current company biography still identifies him as chair and CEO.
Adobe announced Chakravarthy’s appointment on 3 September 2026, with an effective date of 1 December. He leads the Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations. The announcement says he will join the board and Narayen will become executive chair. This profile records that scheduled change separately from the officeholder on its review date.
Firefly moved generation into existing creative work
The first Firefly beta opened on 21 March 2023. Adobe’s announcement focused on images and text effects, with planned connections to its creative and business applications. That launch was the start of a model family, not the founding of a separate company.
By April 2025, Adobe offered Image Model 4, Image Model 4 Ultra and a generally available Video Model in Firefly. Image Model 5 reached general availability in March 2026. These dates describe particular releases; availability in one Adobe application does not establish the same model selection in every other application.
An Adobe application can use another company’s model
Firefly also hosts partner models from companies such as Google, OpenAI, Black Forest Labs and ElevenLabs. Adobe identifies them separately in its model documentation. This catalog attributes those models to their developers rather than adding them to Adobe’s original-model list.
Custom Models adapt Firefly to a customer’s supplied images and are private by default. Subject and style training serve different purposes. A trained customer model is an adaptation of a Firefly release, not another public foundation-model family.
Practical guidance. The guides below cover named Firefly releases and their documented access. They do not turn every Photoshop command, Express feature or unpublished research demonstration into a separate base model. Unconfirmed access is stated where Adobe’s disclosure identifies a model but does not establish a selectable public route.