Move over DALL·E. Step aside, Midjourney. There’s a new image-gen queen in town — and she’s got claws (and logos) to match.
San Francisco-based startup Recraft made headlines with a $30 million Series B round led by Accel alongside investors like Khosla Ventures and Madrona. This follows a $12 million Series A raised in 2024. With 4 million users and more than $5 million in annual recurring revenue, Recraft is quickly becoming a significant force in the generative AI space.
The buzz started when its image model — “red_panda” — quietly outperformed giants like OpenAI’s DALL·E and Midjourney on a respected industry benchmark. The name? A nod to early users who kept generating red pandas at an unusual rate.
But cuteness aside, Recraft is serious about business. Unlike most image generators, Recraft’s AI specialises in brand-friendly visual content, enabling precise logo placement, consistent brand aesthetics, and automated generation of materials like brochures and posters that actually adhere to brand guidelines. That’s a game-changer in a field where many models still fumble with branding basics.
In other words, this is AI with a marketing team’s brain and a designer’s eye. It’s a natural rival to tools like Canva, but it is powered by generative AI from the ground up.
What makes the story even more compelling is the woman behind it: Anna Veronika Dorogush, Recraft’s solo founder and CEO. Before building cutting-edge AI models, Dorogush was a professional model, earning a math and computer science degree from one of Russia’s top universities. Her résumé includes time at Yandex, Google, and Microsoft, but Recraft is her moonshot.
Reflecting on her modelling days, she’s clear-eyed: “Grinding isn’t everything. Success means being excellent at the few things that move the needle.” For Recraft, that mission-critical focus is building world-class AI models — and they’ve delivered.
Recraft isn’t just creating beautiful images — it’s helping brands look sharp, stay consistent, and move fast. And now, it’s got $30 million to take that vision even further.
