The world of fashion is changing at a faster pace every year. Most retailers introduce new styles every season, and fast fashion companies like Shein, H&M, and Zara continually update their collections. To keep up with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers are turning to technology to accelerate the design process.
Raspberry AI, a two-year-old startup, helps designers develop products faster by allowing them to visualize and iterate on ideas almost instantly using a text-to-image platform. It is one of the technological solutions.
Cheryl Liu, the founder of Rasberry, was a private equity analyst specializing in retail at KKR before working at Amazon and DoorDash, and is responsible for the steady adoption of Open AI's DALL-E and Stability AI. As soon as such image models became available, we realized the opportunity to apply generative AI to fashion design. At the end of 2022.
“For the first time in history, we can now quickly create hundreds of designs in a way that was never possible before,” Liu told TechCrunch. She explained that before generative AI, designers had to order physical samples to visualize their ideas, which often took weeks.
Another option was to use older computer-aided design tools such as Browzwear or Adobe's Photoshop.
But with Raspberry, designers can turn sketches into photorealistic images that look just like they appear on a brand's website. Liu said these images help brands decide whether to manufacture the product.
“You can see the same basic pieces in different materials and prints,” she said. “No company would order 50 different sample iterations of one product, but now we can see 50 different iterations of one design.”
This product quickly became popular with the brand. Raspberry currently counts 70 customers, including fashion houses such as sports brand Under Armor, Italian manufacturer Groupo Teddy with 8,840 stores in 39 countries, and luxury designer MCM Worldwide. Masu.
This rapid growth led Raspberry to raise $24 million in Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors Greycroft, Correlation Ventures, and MVP Ventures. The funding comes about 10 months after the startup raised $4.5 million in funding.
Andreessen Horowitz was interested in investing in AI companies that could accelerate the fashion manufacturing process, said Brian Kim, a partner at the firm. “We met with multiple companies and were excited about Cheryl as a founder and her approach to how to build a company.”
Of course, it also helped that Raspberry had “marked very large and important clients,” Kim added.
Liu acknowledged that Raspberry competes with other AI image generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly, but the main reason professional designers choose the company's products is industry-specific It lies in the ability to understand terminology and interpret it accurately.
She gave the example of the term “fuzzy sweater.” She explained: [design specific] Terminology hidden behind sweaters that Midjourners don't know. ”
Another design-specific feature that Raspberry offers is the ability to create images from sketches.
Raspberry will use the funding to hire engineering, sales and marketing experts and expand into product design for homes, furniture and cosmetics.