The stealth AI model defeated Dall-E and Midjourney on popular benchmarks – its creator just landed $30 million

Recraft, the startup behind the mystical imaging model that defeated Openai’s Dall-E and Midjourney last year at the esteemed industry benchmarks, raised a $30 million Series B round led by Accel.

Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures and Madrona. San Francisco-based Recraft had previously raised a $12 million Series A in 2024 led by Khosla. The San Francisco-based startup says it has recently gained $5 million and 4 million users.

Startups attracted industry attention last year when a model called “Red_panda,” a model called “Red_panda,” became the top of the artificial analysis benchmark last year. This was actually a V3 of Recraft, and it won the name because early users kept generating cute mammal images, which led them to TechCrunch, founder and CEO of Recraft.

Recraft says it will build its own model from scratch and compete with other image generators such as Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion and Black Forest Labs. However, Recraft’s AI is particularly good at generating images for brands. This means that you can easily create new marketing materials such as brochures and posters that comply with existing branding guidelines, without any extra editing.

According to Dorogush, it is an area where existing image models are often lacking. This brings Recraft closer to competition with design tools such as Canva with AI generators for branding purposes.

Recraft is also known for being a solo female founder and CEO. Dorogush founded Recraft after years of working with Yandex, a competitor of Google in Russia, along with his previous stints at Google and Microsoft.

Before building AI models, Drogsch worked as a professional model, earning a degree in mathematics and computer science from one of Russia’s top universities. She ends up leaving the job, but says she told her that it was simply working hard – not enough to show up in the endless cast call.

“The biggest lesson I learned back then was that grinding wasn’t everything,” Drogsch said. “Now when building a company, I know that in order to be successful, we need to be superior in mission critical. In our case, the building model is very important. So we’ve won all the effort into this.”