Hajra Naz
Recraft, the startup behind the AI image model that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a major industry benchmark last year, has raised $30 million in Series B funding.
Accel led the investment, with Khosla Ventures and Madrona providing additional support. In 2024, Recraft, a San Francisco-based company, raised $12 million in its Series A funding round. The company reports it has surpassed $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and gained 4 million users.
When Recraft’s AI model, nicknamed “red_panda,” won the 2024 Artificial Intelligence benchmark, it initially attracted notice. The third iteration of this model got its name from the fact that early users frequently produced pictures of the cute animal. The company’s CEO and founder, Anna Veronika Dorogush, shared this fun tidbit.
The startup builds its AI models from the ground up, positioning itself as a competitor to image generators like
- Midjourney
- Adobe Firefly
- Stable Diffusion
- Black Forest Labs.
However, Recraft’s AI shines when it comes to helping brands. It allows companies to place logos accurately, create marketing materials like posters and brochures, and follow branding guidelines easily. This sets it apart from other image models, which often struggle in these areas.
This focus on branding puts Recraft in competition with design tools like Canva, which also includes AI-powered features for creating branded content.
Another noteworthy aspect of Recraft is that its CEO and founder are both women. Dorogush started the company after years of working on machine learning at Yandex, a Russian competitor of Google. He had previously worked at Google and Microsoft. She studied computer science and math at one of Russia’s best colleges and worked as a professional model before delving into AI. Even though she eventually stopped modeling, she learned an important lesson from the experience: hard work isn’t enough.
“The biggest lesson from that time was that grinding isn’t everything,” Dorogush said. “Now, when building a company, I know that success comes from focusing on what’s truly important. For us, excelling in building models is mission-critical, so that’s where we’ve put all our effort.”
