Raspberry AI, a leading generative AI platform for fashion creatives, announced it secured $24 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Existing investors Greycroft, Correlation Ventures, and MVP Ventures participated in the round, along with notable angel investors such as Gokul Rajaram and Ken Pilot.
Raspberry AI will utilize the new funding to accelerate its product development and add top engineering, sales, and marketing talent to its team. Under Armour, MCM Worldwide, Gruppo Teddy, and Li & Fung are among the global fashion leaders using Raspberry AI to rapidly create and iterate apparel, footwear, and accessories styles.
Brands’ and manufacturers’ creative teams have been seeking technology solutions that help them accelerate each stage of the fashion product development cycle to increase speed to market and profitability while reducing costs. Raspberry AI’s end-to-end digital visualization platform frees brands across tiers from luxury to mass market from waiting three weeks or more for physical samples and reduces rote design tasks from hours to seconds so they can focus on creating and iterating products.
The Raspberry AI platform instantly turns designers’ sketches into photorealistic renderings, showing in minute detail how products will look, fit, and drape in real life. And everyday design tasks like visualizing how a previous best-seller would look in new fabrics traditionally required weeks of waiting for a physical sample to arrive from overseas or numerous hours making changes using traditional photo-editing software. And with Raspberry AI, designers can instantly generate a final rendering of any new fabrication in 10 seconds and then seamlessly generate the assets and technical drawings needed for manufacturing—saving time and cost and enabling limitless design iterations.
Raspberry AI’s algorithms are trained to understand the nuances of fashion, apparel, footwear, and accessories and recognize design and manufacturing terms, making it easy for designers to turn text prompts into lifelike images and for marketing teams to generate visual content for any channel without having to invest in destination photoshoots.
Raspberry AI’s machine learning team works with enterprises to custom-train AI models to learn their brands’ unique DNA, aesthetic, and fabric libraries. The company plans to expand its gen AI capabilities beyond fashion into home, furniture, and other retail categories in the coming year.
KEY QUOTES:
“Over the past five years, the combination of fleeting social media trend cycles, the on-demand economy, consumers’ insatiable appetite for newness and the rise of fast fashion has fundamentally changed the way consumers shop. As a result, brands and manufacturers are being challenged to change the way they design and develop products. We’re excited to partner with these visionary investors to empower fashion creatives ranging from designers to product developers to marketers with next-generation tools that allow them to create and market best-selling products more quickly, efficiently and sustainably.”
– Cheryl Liu, CEO and founder of Raspberry AI
“Raspberry AI supercharges creative teams by leveraging AI at every stage of the design workflow. The comprehensiveness and technical depth of the platform have led to strong customer love and some of the strongest engagement metrics we’ve seen for AI tools. We believe that Raspberry AI will rapidly scale and transform the way creative teams design and develop retail products.”
– Bryan Kim, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
“Raspberry AI provides powerful tools that fit our unique fashion design needs. The solution gives our team the freedom to quickly create, iterate and bring their visions to life through highly realistic renderings that capture even the most subtle design details, helping us translate market insights into designs that excite our customers.”
– Mattia Giorgi, Head of AI and Innovation, Gruppo Teddy