Craiyon

Craiyon is a text-to-image AI generator headquartered in Houston, Texas, founded in 2022 by Boris Dayma. The product originated as DALL-E mini, an open-source model Dayma developed during a Hugging Face and Google-sponsored hackathon in 2021, before being rebranded to Craiyon to avoid confusion with OpenAI's DALL-E.

The platform allows users to enter text prompts and receive AI-generated images at no cost, with a subscription tier offering faster generation speeds and ad-free access. Craiyon gained widespread public attention in mid-2022 when DALL-E mini went viral on social media, generating millions of image requests per day. The model is distinct from OpenAI's DALL-E and was built independently using publicly available datasets.

Craiyon operates as a small, largely bootstrapped operation. The company has not disclosed external funding rounds. Revenue is generated through advertising on the free tier and paid subscriptions. The underlying model has been made available on Hugging Face, and the project maintains an open-source presence reflecting its origins in the open research community.