London-based startup Recraft announced today that it has secured $12 million in a series A funding round. The investment was led by Khosla Ventures and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, with participation from RTP Global, Abstract VC, Basis Set Ventures, Elad Gil, and other angels. Recraft, founded by Anna Veronika Dorogush, aims to leverage AI technology to provide brands with a graphic design generator that can generate consistent designs and iterate on them quickly.
The Growing Market of AI Startups in Graphic Design
Recraft is entering a market that is projected to experience significant growth, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 34% between 2022 and 2032. While there are already tools available for AI-based art creation, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 3, Recraft distinguishes itself by focusing on the professional sector of graphic design for brands. The startup offers a web platform where users can easily create raster images, illustrations, 3D images, and scalable vectors like logos and icons, which can be exported as SVG files to support professional applications.
User-Friendly Tools and Features for Graphic Designers
What sets Recraft apart from its competitors is the range of additional tools and features it offers to users to control and modify their AI-generated designs. Users can customize the size and style of the image, choose the geometry of icons and the style of lines, and even define the level of detail. The platform allows designers to create consistent brand assets in a matter of minutes.
Recraft’s platform has already gained traction, attracting over 300,000 users within just eight months since its debut. While it is unclear how many of these users are paying customers, Recraft offers both a free and paid tier, priced at $20 per month. With the new funding, Recraft plans to further enhance its machine learning capabilities and train its own foundation model to generate even better style-consistent design elements and sophisticated graphic designs.
Dorogush, the founder of Recraft, stated, “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. And the development of our Foundation Model will enable us to improve the quality and consistency of the AI-generated graphic design.”
In the long run, Recraft aims to eliminate the need for designers altogether, as the market for design-centric generative AI is expected to grow from $412 million in 2022 to $7.75 billion by 2032, according to Precedence Research. Other players in this space include Typeset, Kittl, and Jasper, while industry leaders like Canva and Adobe have also incorporated AI-powered capabilities into their products.
