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Recraft, a startup based in London, has just announced that it has secured $12 million in a series A round of funding. The investment was co-led by Khosla Ventures and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, with additional support from RTP Global, Abstract VC, Basis Set Ventures, Elad Gil, and other angel investors.
Anna Veronika Dorogush, the founder of Recraft and creator of the open-source gradient boosting library CatBoost, stated that the funding will be used to develop the company’s product and train their own graphic design foundation model. This model aims to help brands generate and iterate on designs quickly, according to their specific color palettes and styles.
Recraft is entering the competitive creative AI market, which is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 34% from 2022 to 2032. Unlike other AI-based art tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 3, Recraft focuses specifically on professional graphic designing for brands.
The startup offers a web platform where users can generate illustrations, 3D images, and scalable vectors such as logos and icons through text prompts. These vectors can be exported as SVG files, making them suitable for professional use. While there are few similar solutions available for graphic designers, research is ongoing into new models like COLE that could serve this sector.
In addition to text-based generation, Recraft provides a range of tools for adjusting and modifying AI-generated images and vectors. Users can change the size and style of their images, customize according to a brand’s color palette, add different layers of colors, and choose background options. They can also define the level of detail and mix styles to create unique designs.
These features enable graphic designers to produce consistent brand assets in minutes. Since its launch about eight months ago, the platform has already attracted over 300,000 users, though it is unclear how many are paying customers. The company offers both a free and a paid tier priced at $20/month.
With the new funding, Recraft plans to enhance its machine learning capabilities and train its own foundation model for generating more style-consistent design elements and sophisticated imagery. They also aim to introduce features like visual referencing with brand imagery for better style control and combining text and images for creating social media posts.
Recraft’s vision is to meet the needs of professional design by generating consistent style images and high-quality vector illustrations suitable for advertising, digital marketing assets, and iconography. Developing their own foundation model will improve the quality and consistency of AI-generated graphic designs.
While it’s unclear which model Recraft currently uses, developing their own could give them an edge in the creative AI market, attracting customers without large design teams. In the long run, significant upgrades could even eliminate the need for designers.
The design-centric generative AI market is projected to grow from $412 million in 2022 to $7.75 billion by 2032, according to Precedence Research. Other companies in this space include Typeset, Kittl, Jasper, as well as industry leaders like Canva and Adobe, which have also integrated AI-powered capabilities into their products.