A Quiet Powerhouse in AI Just Surprised the Industry

In a world where giants like DALL-E and Midjourney dominate the headlines, an under-the-radar startup named Recraft quietly built something extraordinary—and now, the world is starting to notice.

Recraft, a San Francisco-based company, has just raised $30 million in fresh funding, led by Accel. Other big-name investors like Khosla Ventures and Madrona also joined the round. It’s a huge leap forward for a company that only last year raised $12 million and was still relatively unknown outside industry circles.

But Recraft’s big moment came when its image generation model, nicknamed “red_panda,” beat out the likes of OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney in a respected benchmark called Artificial Analysis. The name? A quirky nod to users who kept generating images of red pandas early on. But behind the cuteness is a powerful third-generation AI model that turned heads for its performance.

At the heart of it all is founder and CEO Anna Veronika Dorogush, a woman who has quietly defied expectations her entire career. Before launching Recraft, she worked in machine learning at Yandex—Russia’s answer to Google—and also spent time at tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Even earlier, she was a professional model while juggling a math and computer science degree at one of Russia’s top universities. That experience, she says, taught her a hard truth: working hard isn’t enough if you’re not aiming in the right direction.

“Back then, I was constantly hustling, showing up to casting after casting,” Dorogush recalled. “But I realized grinding alone doesn’t guarantee success. Now, I focus that energy on what truly matters—like building great models. That’s where excellence really counts.”

And build they have. Unlike others who rely on pre-built models, Recraft builds everything from the ground up. It competes not only with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Adobe Firefly, but also overlaps with tools like Canva. What makes Recraft different is its focus: making it incredibly easy for brands to create custom images that align perfectly with their visual identity—think logos placed just right, or marketing materials that need little to no post-editing.

It’s a niche, but one that matters deeply to companies who need consistent branding without extra effort—and it’s where many big-name image generators often fall short.

With over 4 million users and $5 million in annual recurring revenue, Recraft is no longer flying under the radar. And with $30 million more in the bank, they’re just getting started.