Recraft’s AI graphic design tool secures $12M in Series A funding
AI graphic design generator Recraft today announced $12 million in Series A funding in a round led by Khosla Ventures and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Most generative AI tools only generate raster images, which cover a portion of all professional design tasks.
By comparison, UK company Recraft develops both raster and infinitely scalable vector images that support professional applications of graphic designs. It enables users to generate and edit vector art, icons, 3D images and illustrations within a brand’s style controls, such as the colour palette, geometry of icons, and the style of lines.
This enables designers to create branded assets without solely relying on text prompts. The company already has over 300,000 users in the eight months since its launch.
The team is led by founder, Anna Veronika Dorogush, the creator of CatBoost, one of the most popular machine learning frameworks globally, with hundreds of thousands of weekly downloads.
Dorogush comments:
“I truly believe that AI has the ability to reshape design and influence the way that we look at the world.
Recraft was created to meet the requirements of professional design, generating consistent style images and high-quality vector illustrations suitable for everything from advertising and digital marketing assets to iconography.
The development of our Foundation Model will enable us to improve the quality and consistency of the AI-generated graphic design.”
The new funding enabled the team to be one of the very few companies developing their own Foundation Model, a pre-trained, deep learning algorithm, rather than using open source AI platforms, like Stable Diffusion.
The Foundational Model will radically improve the quality of the AI-generated imagery developed, as fine-tuning Stable Diffusion ultimately limits the quality of images.
The $12M Series A funding round was led by Khosla Ventures and former GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman, former CEO of Github, with participation from RTP Global, Abstract VC and Basis Set, as well as angel investors including Elad Gil; Zhenya Loginov, former Chief Revenue Officer at Miro; Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO at HubSpot; and Akshay Kothari, Co-founder of Notion.
Nikita Shamgunov, Partner at Khosla Ventures, commented:
“To date, many of the generative AI design solutions have been targeting consumers, rather than professionals that require high degrees of control.
Recraft delivers on professional workflows such as vector images, style controls and end-to-end content production, all powered by in-house built foundation models.
Anna Veronika and her team have extensive experience in AI and machine learning, and we are excited to lead the company Series A.”
Lead image: Anna Veronika Dorogush, CEO and founder of Recraft.
link