ComfyUI, the node-based workflow tool for controlling diffusion model outputs, has raised $30 million at a $500 million valuation in a round led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow, TechCrunch reports. The company says it now has more than 4 million users, drawn from visual effects, animation, advertising, and industrial design.
From open-source project to formal company
ComfyUI started as an open-source project in 2023, shortly after diffusion models became widely available. In late 2024 ComfyUI raised $19 million in a Series A from investors including Chemistry Ventures, Cursor Capital, and Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel. The new $30 million round follows that.
The report says ComfyUI’s offering has become sufficiently embedded in professional workflows that “ComfyUI artist or engineer” now appears as a formal job title on studio job boards.
How the tool works and what the founders say about it
ComfyUI’s node-based interface lets creators control individual steps of the generation process rather than submitting a single prompt and accepting the result. Co-founder and CEO Yoland Yan described the gap with prompt-based tools to TechCrunch: “If you think about your typical prompt-based solution, like Midjourney or ChatGPT, you ask for something, it [gets only] 60%–80% there. But to change that remaining 20%, you have to try this slot machine.” Yan compared the experience to playing a casino because prompting a model to make a small change can overwrite the parts that were already working.
ComfyUI’s node-based approach links specific generation components so creators can adjust one part of the pipeline without affecting the rest.
The market argument
Yan’s case to TechCrunch was that the need for granular control grows even as foundation models improve: “In the world where AI slop is going to be everywhere, the Comfy version of human-in-the-loop approach is going to win out most of the eyeballs in the end.”
The report describes the customer base extending beyond image generation to video, audio, and industrial design. TechCrunch notes that ComfyUI’s competitors include Weavy, a startup acquired by Figma last year.