Raspberry AI raises $24M from a16z to accelerate fashion design

The world of fashion is moving at a faster pace every year. Most retailers introduce new styles every season, and fast-fashion companies such as Shein, H&M and Zara constantly update their collections. To keep up with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers are turning to technology to accelerate their design process.

Raspberry AIA startup founded two years ago is among the tech solutions that help accelerate product development by allowing designers to visualize and iterate on their ideas instantly through a text-to-image platform.

Raspberry founder Cheryl Liu, a private equity analyst at KKR who focused on retail before working for Amazon and DoorDash, saw an opportunity to apply generative AI to fashion design after image models like OpenAI. Dal-e And Stability AIIts stable expansion is available by the end of 2022.

“For the first time in history, you can quickly create hundreds of designs in a way you’ve never been able to do before,” Liu told TechCrunch. He explained that before generative AI, designers often had to order physical samples to visualize their ideas, which would take weeks.

The other option was to use browserware and older computer-aided design tools like Adobe’s Photoshop.

But with Raspberry, designers can turn their sketches into photo-realistic images just as they appear on the brand’s website. These images can help brands decide whether they want to make the product, according to Liu.

“You can see the same foundational piece in so many different materials and prints,” she said. “No company is going to order 50 different sample iterations for a single product, but now they’re going to see 50 different iterations of a single design.”

The product quickly became popular with the brand. Today, Raspberry counts 70 customers, including fashion houses such as athletic brand Under Armour, Grupo Teddy, an Italian manufacturer with 8840 stores in 39 countries, and global luxury designer MCM.

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’s $4.5 million round.

Andreessen Horowitz was interested in investing in an AI company that could speed up the fashion manufacturing process, said Brian Kim, a partner at the firm. “We have met with multiple companies and are excited about Cheryl as a founder and how she is going about building a company.”

Of course, it also helped that Raspberry has “mark clients that are very, very large and important,” Kim added.

While Liu admits that Raspberry competes with other AI image generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Adobe Firefly, a key reason professional designers choose his company’s products is its ability to understand and accurately interpret industry-specific terminology.

He gave an example of the term “fuzzy sweater”. He explained: “There are many [design specific] The terminology behind that sweater a midjourney doesn’t know.”

Another design-specific feature that Raspberry offers 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 cosmetics product design.