A stealth AI model beat DALL-E and Midjourney on a popular benchmark — its creator just landed $30M

Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious image model that beat OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney on a respected industry benchmark last year, has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Accel, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Based in San Francisco, Recraft previously raised a $12 million Series A led by Khosla in 2024. The San Francisco-based startup says it recently passed $5 million in ARR and 4 million users. The startup caught industry attention when its model, codenamed “red_panda,” topped the Artificial Analysis benchmark last year. This was actually Recraft’s V3, which earned its name because early users kept generating images of the cute mammal, Recraft’s founder and CEO Anna Veronika Dorogush told TechCrunch. Recraft says it builds its own models from scratch and competes with other image generators like Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion and Black Forest Labs, Dorogush said. But Recraft’s AI particu ... Read full article.