Vue.ai, a Redwood City, California-based intelligent retail automation company, announced it has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Falcon Edge Capital. Sequoia Capital India and Global Brain (GP of KDDI Innovation Fund) also participated in this round. Including this round, Vue.ai has raised $27.5 million.
The company is growing at a rapid pace as Vue.ai saw a fourfold annual revenue increase. And this funding round will be used for growing the team, delivering on its product roadmap, and scaling the company’s existing customer base — which includes leading retailers across the globe like Macy’s, Mercadolibre and Tata.
“The future of retail is entertainment. The experience economy we see today is the start of that era,” said Vue.ai CEO and founder Ashwini Asokan in a statement. “Brands are shifting to designing worlds that consumers want to be a part of and that has to integrate with the new ways people shop. Vue is the electricity that powers all these complicated and important retail functions so retailers can focus on the business of entertaining you”
Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran founded Vue.ai in 2016 as the first artificial intelligence brand spun out of its parent company Mad Street Den. The Vue.ai team is comprised of neuroscientists and AI experts who have worked at IBM, Intel, and DARPA.
One of the most competitive challenges for retailers is that Amazon and Alibaba are using AI to personalize products and shoppers in order to provide a seamless brand experience. And the battle for saying competitive comes at a tremendous cost to retailers who are projected to spend more than $7 billion on artificial intelligence over the next three years. By offering a one-stop shop across the value chain, Vue.ai is aiming to become the first AI solution to automate critical functions across departments heavily dependent on human intuition — which unifies data about products, people, and processes.
To do so, Vue.ai combines seven different products in order to offer retailers a unified system used as a “neural network” for decision-making. And by using a centralized data brain, the platform digitally maps a retailer’s product DNA and then translates product information into language that teams can better understand. The accuracy and insightful information that the platform provides also enables retailers to easily decode the quality of their merchandise and make intelligence updates on-the-fly.
Some of Vue.ai’s products include VueTag (Automated tagging to streamline product catalogs/inventory management), VueCommerce (real-time personalized styling recommendations for shoppers), VueModel (AI-generated human models — which saves brands millions in offline photography, styling and merchandising costs), VueStyle (AI stylist that automates outfitting based on users’ personal style), VueFind (Personal style-focused visual search and product discovery), VueMail (Real-time dynamic email personalization including style recommendations for boosting conversions), and VueStudio (makes any branded content shoppable instantly).
“The Vue.ai team is on a mission to put AI and intelligent automation in the hands of teams across the globe in ways that improve productivity and growth multi-fold,” added Sequoia Capital India director and CTO Anandamoy Roychowdhary. “We’ve seen incredible growth in how they’ve brought this value across multiple functions in the retail industry in just two years since we started this journey with them. Sequoia India is excited to partner with Falcon Edge in this round, enabling Ashwini and Anand to scale Vue.ai globally.”
