Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious picture mannequin that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a revered trade benchmark final yr, has raised a $30 million Collection B spherical led by Accel, it completely advised TechCrunch.
Different traders within the spherical embrace Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Primarily based in San Francisco, Recraft beforehand raised a $12 million Collection 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 trade consideration when its mannequin, codenamed “red_panda,” topped the Synthetic Evaluation benchmark final yr. This was truly Recraft’s V3, which earned its identify as a result of early customers stored producing pictures of the lovable mammal, Recraft’s founder and CEO Anna Veronika Dorogush advised TechCrunch.
Recraft says it builds its personal fashions from scratch and competes with different picture turbines like Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Secure Diffusion, and Black Forest Labs, Dorogush mentioned. However Recraft’s AI notably excels at producing pictures for manufacturers. Which means permitting them to put logos precisely the place wanted with out additional modifying, or simply producing new advertising and marketing supplies like brochures and posters that adjust to present branding pointers.
It’s an space the place present picture fashions usually fall brief, based on Dorogush. That places Recraft nearer to competing with design instruments like Canva, which additionally has an AI generator for branding functions.
Recraft can 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 all Russia’s high universities. She ended up leaving that line of labor however says it taught her that merely working onerous — like exhibiting as much as countless casting calls — wasn’t sufficient.
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“The largest lesson from that point was that grinding isn’t all the pieces,” Dorogush mentioned. “Now when constructing an organization, I do know that to succeed, we’ve got to be glorious at what’s mission-critical. In our case, constructing fashions is essential. So we’ve got put all the trouble into excelling at this.”
