Recraft

Overview Recraft is the AI image tool designers actually use, and the only one whose native output is a vector file rather than a raster image. Founded in 2022 in London by Anna Veronika Dorogush — a former Yandex ML engineer who built CatBoost — Recraft launched publicly in early 2023 with a very deliberately narrow pitch: not a chatbot for pictures, but a design tool with generative AI baked into every panel. Three years later, in mid 2026, Recraft is the reference tool for anything that needs to output as SVG, and it has quietly become the model of choice for professional graphic designers, brand teams, and illustrators who care about scalable, editable output. What sets Recraft apart is a design first orientation that runs deep into the model architecture, not just the UI. Recraft V3 (launched late 2024) was the first generative model to achieve state of the art results on the standard image benchmarks while also natively outputting vectors — clean SVGs with editable paths, not raster images with a "trace to vector" post process. That distinction matters enormously if you are a logo designer, a brand system builder, an illustrator working across print and screen, or anyone who needs to hand a client a file they can scale to any size without artifacts. Beyond the vector output, Recraft ships a full design workspace: infinite canvas, layers, style locking across a project, brand kit management, mockup tools, and a "style" system where you upload references, train a…