At Madrona, we believe that the most successful applied AI companies combine exceptional AI models—sometimes horizontal, sometimes domain-specific—with an equally powerful understanding of user needs and workflows, all delivered through compelling user experiences. Recraft perfectly embodies this ideal, and we’re thrilled to announce our investment in their $30M Series B alongside Accel, Khosla Ventures, Nat Friedman, and Elad Gil.
Recraft is an AI-powered design platform created specifically for professional graphic designers.
Historically, designers faced a difficult trade-off between creativity, quality, and efficiency — often having to settle for just one or two. Recraft uniquely solves this problem, enabling designers to achieve creative exploration, high-quality outputs, and efficiency simultaneously, all while providing robust controls over brand styles and image editing.
Recraft serves a wide range of design needs, empowering users to effortlessly generate and refine both raster and vector graphics, including logos, icons, illustrations, and advanced 3D visuals. What makes Recraft truly exceptional isn’t just its groundbreaking AI model, but how thoughtfully the platform integrates that model into the daily workflows of creative professionals—whether they’re freelancers, agencies, or in-house teams. Unlike consumer-focused AI design tools, Recraft has become especially beloved by professional designers because it was purpose-built from day one with their specific needs in mind.
We first met Recraft’s founder Anna Dorogush Veronika in early 2024 through Nikita Shamgunov, the founder of Neon and former venture partner at Khosla Ventures, who had led Recraft’s Series A. Immediately, Anna’s tenacity, technical depth, and profound empathy for designers resonated deeply with us. We continued to closely monitor the AI design space and reconnected with Anna after Recraft released its groundbreaking V3 model in late October, which immediately topped the Artificial Analysis leaderboard for text-to-image generation models. We’re excited to join this round alongside new investor Accel, existing investors Khosla Ventures, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and independent board member Mikhail Parakhin, CTO of Shopify and a good friend of Madrona.
Beyond the model’s outstanding performance, what truly impressed us was Recraft’s keen understanding of the professional design experience. Creative professionals measure success by their ability to consistently deliver high-quality visuals aligned precisely with brand integrity across multiple formats. Recraft meets this critical demand through features like its infinite canvas editor, advanced style control, and easy creation of cohesive image sets. This dedication to quality and control transforms Recraft from simply an innovative tool into an indispensable resource.
Building on its strong product momentum, Recraft has recently introduced Advanced Style Creation and Control. This significant update enhances Recraft’s ability to empower professional designers with even greater brand consistency and control, including:
- An Infinite Style Library that provides ready-to-use unique brand styles or creative inspiration spanning a limitless range from photorealistic to illustrative styles.
- Style Remixing capabilities, enabling designers to blend Recraft styles with their own images to produce precise, uniquely branded, production-quality visuals.
- Tools to save and share styles with internal teams or external partners, facilitating rapid and consistent brand imagery generation.
The strength of Recraft’s team further reinforces our enthusiasm. Led by Anna, the creator of the renowned CatBoost machine learning framework, the team uniquely combines deep AI expertise with genuine passion for addressing real-world design challenges. Their approach harmonizes technological innovation with an empathetic understanding of designers’ everyday realities, firmly establishing Recraft as a leader in professional design software.
Madrona has long advocated for intelligent applications that embed AI seamlessly into professional workflows—enhancing, not merely automating, the creative process. This perspective guided our previous investments in companies like Runway and Typeface. Recraft exemplifies this vision, focusing not only on technological superiority but also on providing tangible, workflow-oriented benefits to designers requiring precision, consistency, and creative control.
Recraft has rapidly become the trusted platform for over 4 million designers navigating their craft in the AI era, including enterprise design teams at companies such as Amazon, NVIDIA, Salesforce, and Uber. Looking ahead, Recraft is ideally positioned to significantly influence a broad spectrum of creative industries. The growing demand for visually consistent, brand-aligned, and efficiently produced content perfectly matches Recraft’s strengths in model innovation and workflow optimization.
We’re thrilled to partner with Anna and the entire Recraft team at this exciting stage. Their combination of technical excellence and a nuanced understanding of professional designers’ needs positions them not merely as participants in the generative AI revolution — but as pioneers shaping its future.
Explore Recraft’s capabilities (and generous free tier!) at: https://www.recraft.ai
Congratulations to the entire Recraft team on achieving this milestone — we’re excited for the journey ahead!
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