The stealth AI model beats Dall-E and Midjourney with popular benchmarks. Its creators just made $30 million.

Rocraft is the startup behind a mysterious image model that beat Openai’s Dall-E and Midjourney last year with respectable industry benchmarks, which raised a $30 million Series B convergence led by Accel, which exclusively told TechCrunch.

Other investors in the round include Khosla Ventures and Madrona. Based in San Francisco, Rosaft previously raised a $12 million Series A-based A led by Khosla in 2024. The San Francisco-based startup said it recently passed $5 million in ARR and 4 million users.

The startup’s model (codenamed “Red_panda”) attracted industry attention when its artificial analysis benchmark was high last year. This is actually Recraft's V3, which earned the name because Recraft's founder and CEO Anna Veronika Dorogush told TechCrunch that it was because early users kept generating images of cute mammals.

Dorogush said Recraft said it builds its own model from scratch and competes with other image generators such as Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion and Black Forest Labs. But Remaft's AI is particularly good at generating images for brands. This means allowing them to place their logos precisely when needed without additional editing, or easily generate new marketing materials such as brochures and posters that fit into existing brand guidelines.

According to Dorogush, this is an area where existing image models are often insufficient. This brings Remaft closer to competing with design tools like Canva, which also has an AI generator for branding purposes.

The recruiter is also known for having a solo female founder and CEO. Dorogush has worked on Yandex for many years at Recraft for many years at the Russian Google rival Yandex and has served in previous positions at Google and Microsoft.

Before building AI models, Dorogush received a degree in mathematics and computer science from a top Russian university, once a professional model. She eventually left the job, but said it told her that it wasn't enough to just work hard (like the endless casting phones appearing).

“The biggest lesson since then is that grinding is not everything,” Dorogush said. “Now, when building a company, I know that to be successful, we have to do a great job in mission-criticality. In our case, it's very important to build models. So, we've put in a huge effort to do that.”