How AI Tools Are Reinventing Designer's Work for Business

From launch to 350,000 users and $12 million round in 8 months

👋 Hey, I’m Daniil and welcome to a ✨ subscriber-only edition ✨ of Creators’ AI. By subscribing, you directly support Creators' AI's mission to deliver top AI insights & practical knowledge without ads or clutter. Your subscription allows us to grow our dedicated team and curate the most important AI Tools, Stories, and Tutorials in one place. - Daniil

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Intro 

Well, we're already used to AI being helpful. And we also know that AI generates actual revenue. To be clear, AI startups, not anyone else, have raised the most significant capital from VCs in 2023! But, let’s agree, a couple of successful years is not enough to draw full-fledged conclusions.

Right now, it's more important than ever for us, AI enthusiasts, to prove that artificial intelligence is not a temporary phenomenon. It is an integral part of our future. How do we accomplish this? The answer is simple: make AI an essential part of life for highly specialized professionals. Today, we will talk about a startup creating just such a product.

Meet Recraft by Anna Veronika Dorogush! Recraft is an AI platform (based on the model, designed from scratch!) for experienced designers who work with raster and vector images. Less than eight months after its public release, Recraft has reached an audience of 350,000 people, generated over 50 million projects, and raised $12 million in the first funding round.

Let's break down the path of Anna Veronika and her product, determine why it's essential, and what knowledge we can use.

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From launch to 350,000 users and $12 million round in 8 months 

Like the story of many ambitious founders, Anna Veronika’s journey began long before Recraft. She is not the most public entrepreneur, but some facts from her biography speak eloquently about her talents. She was born into a family of mathematicians, graduated from Moscow State University with a computational mathematics and cybernetics degree, and later worked as an engineer in several global companies.

In particular, she worked as an engineer at Google and Microsoft and also held the position of head of machine learning systems with the search engine Yandex. After gaining experience from the IT companies, the future founder started developing her own projects. 

In 2017, she created CatBoost, a high-performance open-source library for gradient boosting on decision trees. And even before “the AI boom,” this platform became popular among developers. A few months after its launch, CatBoost began to be downloaded more than 100,000 times a week, and even Netflix and Cloudflare were among the users.

When CarBoost gained a foothold in the market and moved into autonomous products, Anna Veronika launched our new guest, Recraft. Long story short, this brings us to a breakdown of the product, its business model, and financial results. Let's look at why this startup is more important than it seems at first glance. 

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How it works

As we mentioned earlier, Recraft is a tool for designers. But not a tool like Midjourney, DALL-E, or Stability.ai. Even before launch, the platform decided to cater to the demands of professional designers. This approach kills two birds with one stone: it creates an understanding of the product and a business model with high potential.