Recraft raises $30 million to challenge DALL-E and Midjourney
Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious image model that outperformed OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a respected industry benchmark, has secured a $30 million Series B funding round led by Accel. The San Francisco-based company revealed this development exclusively to TechCrunch.
The funding round also saw participation from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Recraft had previously raised a $12 million Series A round led by Khosla in 2024. The startup has now reported revenues exceeding $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has garnered 4 million users.
Recraft gained industry attention when its model, codenamed “red_panda,” topped the Artificial Analysis benchmark last year. According to Anna Veronika Dorogush, Recraft’s founder and CEO, this achievement was made by the company’s V3 model, named due to early users frequently generating images of the animal.
Dorogush stated that Recraft develops its models from scratch, competing directly with other image generators such as Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion, and Black Forest Labs. The company’s AI model excels particularly at generating images for brands, allowing them to precisely place logos and create new marketing materials that adhere to existing branding guidelines without requiring extensive editing.
Existing image models often struggle with this task, according to Dorogush, positioning Recraft as a competitor to design tools like Canva, which also features an AI generator for branding purposes. Recraft’s strengths in this area underscore its potential in the market.
Dorogush founded Recraft after gaining experience in machine learning at Yandex, as well as previous stints at Google and Microsoft. Before her career in AI, she worked as a professional model while pursuing a degree in math and computer science at a top Russian university. Dorogush reflected that her modeling days taught her the importance of excelling in mission-critical areas, stating, “The biggest lesson from that time was that grinding isn’t everything… Now when building a company, I know that to succeed, we have to be excellent at what’s mission-critical.”