Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious picture mannequin that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a revered business benchmark final 12 months, has raised a $30 million Sequence B spherical led by Accel, it completely instructed TechCrunch.
Different traders within the spherical embody Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Based mostly in San Francisco, Recraft beforehand raised a $12 million Sequence A led by Khosla in 2024. The San Francisco-based startup says it lately handed $5 million in ARR and 4 million customers.
The startup caught business consideration when its mannequin, codenamed “red_panda,” topped the Synthetic Evaluation benchmark final 12 months. This was truly Recraft’s V3, which earned its title as a result of early customers stored producing pictures of the lovable mammal, Recraft’s founder and CEO Anna Veronika Dorogush instructed TechCrunch.
Recraft says it builds its personal fashions from scratch and competes with different picture turbines like Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Steady Diffusion and Black Forest Labs, Dorogush mentioned. However Recraft’s AI notably excels at producing pictures for manufacturers. Meaning permitting them to put logos precisely the place wanted with out further modifying, or simply producing new advertising and marketing supplies like brochures and posters that adjust to present branding tips.
It’s an space the place present picture fashions typically fall quick, in keeping with Dorogush. That places Recraft nearer to competing with design instruments like Canva, which additionally has an AI generator for branding functions.
Recraft can also be notable for having a solo feminine founder and CEO. Dorogush based Recraft after years of engaged on machine studying at Yandex – the Russian Google competitor – together with prior stints at Google and Microsoft.
Earlier than constructing AI fashions, Dorogush labored as knowledgeable mannequin whereas she earned a math and laptop science diploma at one in every of Russia’s high universities. She ended up leaving that line of labor, however says it taught her that merely working exhausting – like displaying as much as countless casting calls – wasn’t sufficient.
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“The most important lesson from that point was that grinding isn’t all the things,” Dorogush mentioned. “Now when constructing an organization, I do know that to succeed, we’ve to be wonderful at what’s mission-critical. In our case, constructing fashions is essential. So we’ve put all the hassle into excelling at this.”