Raspberry AI raises $24M from a16z to accelerate fashion design
The fashion world is evolving at a faster pace every year. Most retailers launch new styles every season, and fast fashion companies like Shein, H&M and Zara are constantly updating their product ranges. To keep up with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers have been turning to technology to speed up their design processes.
One of the technology solutions helping speed up product development is Raspberry AI, a startup founded two years ago that allows designers to visualize and iterate on their ideas almost instantly through its text-to-image platform.
Rasberry founder Cheryl Liu was a private equity analyst at KKR before working for Amazon and DoorDash, focusing on the retail industry. After the advent of image models such as Open AI's DALL-E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, she found the future Opportunities for applying generative AI to fashion design late 2022.
“For the first time in history, you can quickly create hundreds of designs in a way that was never possible before,” Liu told TechCrunch. Before generating AI, designers typically had to order physical samples to visualize their ideas, which took weeks, she explained.
Another option is to use older computer-aided design tools such as Browzwear and Adobe's Photoshop.
But with Raspberry, designers can turn their sketches into realistic images that appear on the brand's website. Liu said the images can help brands decide whether to produce the product.
“You can see the same basic piece in a lot of different materials and prints,” she says. “No company would order 50 different sample iterations of a product, but now they can see 50 different iterations of a design.”
The product quickly became popular with the brand. Today, Raspberry has 70 clients, including sportswear brand Under Armour, fashion houses such as Gruppo Teddy, an Italian manufacturer with 8,840 stores in 39 countries, and luxury brand MCM Worldwide.
Such rapid growth helped Raspberry raise a $24 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Greycroft, Correlation Ventures and MVP Ventures. The funding comes about 10 months after the startup closed a $4.5 million seed round.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Bryan Kim expressed interest in investing in an artificial intelligence company that can speed up the fashion manufacturing process. “We met with multiple companies and were excited about Cheryl as a founder and how she could build the company.”
Of course, Raspberry has “very, very large and important customers,” Kim added.
While Liu acknowledges that Raspberry competes with other AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E and Adobe Firefly, a key reason professional designers choose his company's product is its ability to understand and accurately interpret industry-specific terminology.
She gave the example of the word “blurred sweater.” “There’s a lot of terminology behind the sweater that people in the middle of the road don’t know,” she explains.
Another design-specific feature offered by Raspberry is the ability to create images from sketches.
Raspberry will use the funds to hire engineering, sales and marketing professionals and expand into home, furniture and cosmetic design.
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