Recraft suits in-house design and marketing teams that need on-brand visuals fast without a freelance illustrator for every asset. With more than 4 million registered users and native SVG output for editable logos and icons, it replaces a mix of stock libraries, Midjourney and manual vector tracing for teams that need machine-editable files, not just flat images.
Recraft is a browser-based AI design platform where text prompts generate editable raster images, vector graphics, icons and simple 3D assets on one canvas. Recraft V3 topped the Artificial Analysis text-to-image leaderboard in October 2024, and the platform natively exports SVG files that most AI image tools cannot produce directly.
Founded: 2022 · HQ: London, United Kingdom · Team: 50-54 · CEO: Anna Veronika Dorogush · Funding: $42M total raised across Series A and Series B (leads: Khosla Ventures, Accel)
About Recraft
Recraft was founded in 2022 by Anna Veronika Dorogush, a machine learning scientist best known for co-creating CatBoost, the gradient-boosting library built at Yandex. Before starting Recraft she led machine learning engineering teams and studied mathematics and computer science, while also working for several years as a professional fashion model, a dual background she has said shaped how closely the company works with designers rather than just engineers. Recraft, Inc. emerged from stealth on May 31, 2023, publishing its vector graphics generation capability on Product Hunt. The company is incorporated in the United States and now runs its main office out of London, United Kingdom. The core product is a browser-based design studio where a single canvas holds raster images, vector illustrations, icons, mockups and simple 3D renders, all generated from text prompts or reference images and then edited by hand. Recraft's own image models sit alongside third-party models such as Google's Imagen and Veo, OpenAI's GPT Image and Sora, and Black Forest Labs' Flux, all callable from the same interface so a designer never has to leave the canvas to switch tools. The platform also ships a standalone vectorizer, an image upscaler, a background remover and a REST API that developers can call directly, and in July 2025 Recraft added Model Context Protocol support so the same generation tools can be driven from Claude, Cursor and other AI agents. Recraft V4 shipped on February 17, 2026 as what the company calls a ground-up rebuild of its generation pipeline, aimed at composition and color choices that read as art-directed rather than stock-photo generic, across both raster and native vector output. Recraft V4.1 followed on May 14, 2026 as a refinement pass with stronger prompt understanding, and in July 2026 the company folded two Gemini-powered models into Recraft Studio alongside it. In December 2025 Recraft introduced an agentic mode that lets a user describe an edit in plain language on the canvas instead of writing a structured prompt, and in January 2026 it became the first AI image generation company to earn AIUC-1 certification, an outside audit of how an AI system behaves in production. Recraft has raised a total of $42M across two priced rounds from 13 disclosed investors. The Series A closed in January 2024 for $12M, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman. The Series B closed in May 2025 for $30M, led by Accel with Madrona Ventures joining as a new investor alongside returning backers Khosla Ventures, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil and RTP Global; an extension to that round later added Nvidia and Slack's former SVP of design, Ethan Eismann, as investors. Recraft sells seat-based subscriptions to its design studio plus metered API access billed by generation, the same two-sided model used by most AI image vendors. Third-party estimates from Latka put the company's annualized revenue at roughly $8.4M as of September 2025 on a team of about 50 people at the time, a figure Recraft itself has not confirmed publicly. Enterprise customers reported using the product include design and marketing teams at Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, HubSpot, Asana, Airbus and the agency Ogilvy. Anna Veronika Dorogush remains founder and chief executive. Recraft has stayed intentionally lean for its funding and user base: reporting put headcount at 50 employees in mid-2025 and 54 by May 2026, spread mostly across the London headquarters. Company and press profiles describe the team's approach as prioritizing a small number of senior generalists over rapid hiring, which the founder has credited for the pace of model releases relative to headcount. Recraft states its goal as making the product an essential daily tool for every designer by giving creative teams full control over the output of an AI system rather than a one-shot image they have to accept or discard. On data handling, the company says user-generated and uploaded assets are not used to train external models, and it aligns its personal-data practices with GDPR, including honoring deletion requests. It does not publish a public safety framework comparable to the responsible-scaling policies used by large frontier-model labs, which is typical for a company its size that licenses some third-party models rather than training all of them in-house. Recraft competes most directly with Midjourney, Ideogram and OpenAI's DALL-E line on raw image quality, and differentiates on native SVG vector output, editable layers and brand-consistency tools that those competitors do not offer in the same form. Recraft V3, released in October 2024, took first place on the Artificial Analysis text-to-image leaderboard ahead of DALL-E 3 and Midjourney at the time, and outside coverage has specifically framed the company as beating those two incumbents on that benchmark. Recraft's weaker spot relative to Midjourney is community and template culture, since Midjourney's Discord-native workflow has a much larger hobbyist base. Recraft completed a SOC 2 Type II audit effective December 18, 2025, confirmed by the certification announcement in February 2026, and payment processing runs through Stripe and Google Pay so Recraft itself never stores card details. The company has not published a stated classification under the EU AI Act as of mid-2026, which is common among design-tool vendors that primarily orchestrate third-party foundation models rather than release general-purpose models of systemic scale themselves. Recraft reports more than 4 million registered users, a base it says grew tenfold in two years with a 700% increase in adoption over the twelve months before the Series B announcement. With no announced IPO, acquisition or merger as of August 2026, the company's public roadmap centers on deepening agentic and MCP-based workflows so its models can be called from other AI tools rather than only its own canvas.
Mission
Make AI a genuine creative partner so every design team can explore freely, deliver at a high standard, and stay in control of the outcome.
Products
- Recraft Studio (Web-based AI design canvas): https://www.recraft.ai
- Recraft API (Developer API for image/vector generation): https://www.recraft.ai/docs/api-reference/getting-started
- Recraft Vectorizer (Raster-to-vector conversion tool): https://www.recraft.ai
- Recraft MCP integration (Agent tool connector (Claude, Cursor)): https://www.recraft.ai/docs
Recraft Models on HokAI
Compliance
SOC 2 Type II, AIUC-1
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
How much funding has Recraft raised?
Recraft has raised $42M total: a $12M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, followed by a $30M Series B led by Accel that later added Nvidia as an investor through an extension. The company has not disclosed a valuation for either round.
What does Recraft actually make?
Recraft's own image line runs through its V3 and V4.1 models, generating raster images, native vector graphics (SVG), icons and simple 3D renders from a single canvas. The same studio also gives users access to third-party models like Flux, Imagen and GPT Image, plus a standalone vectorizer, background remover and image upscaler, all reachable through the web app or a developer API.
Is Recraft SOC 2 or GDPR compliant?
Yes: Recraft holds an independent SOC 2 Type II audit plus AIUC-1 certification, a standard that evaluates how an AI system behaves in production rather than just its paperwork. Personal data handling follows GDPR, including honoring user deletion requests, and payment card data is handled entirely by Stripe and Google Pay so Recraft never stores it directly.
What are the best alternatives to Recraft?
Midjourney remains the default pick for raw stylistic range and its large Discord community of prompt templates, something Recraft does not try to match. Ideogram is the stronger choice when the main job is reliable text and typography inside an image. Choose Recraft over both when the deliverable needs to leave the canvas as an editable, brand-consistent vector file rather than a flat picture.
How do you get started with Recraft?
Sign up at recraft.ai with an email or Google account to reach the free plan, which includes a limited number of generations on the browser canvas without a credit card. From there, a paid seat unlocks higher generation limits and commercial usage rights, and developers can skip the UI entirely and call the same models through Recraft's REST API with an API key.