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

The world of fashion moves 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 have turned to technology to speed up their design process.

Raspberry AIa startup founded two years ago, is one of the technological solutions that helps accelerate product development by allowing designers to visualize and iterate their ideas almost instantly with its text-to-image platform.

Rasberry founder Cheryl Liu, who was a retail-focused private equity analyst at KKR before working for Amazon and DoorDash, saw the opportunity to apply generative AI to fashion design right away. after image models such as Open AI. DALL-E and AI stabilityThe stable spread became available at the end of 2022.

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

The other alternative was to use older computer-aided design tools such as Browzwear and Adobe Photoshop.

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

“You can see the same foundation piece in a lot of different materials and prints,” he said. “No company is going to order 50 different sample iterations for a single product, but now they can see 50 different iterations of a single design.”

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

Such rapid growth helped Raspberry raise a $24 million 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’s $4.5 million round.

Andreessen Horowitz was interested in investing in an AI company that can speed up the fashion manufacturing process, said Bryan Kim, a partner at the firm. “We met with several companies and were excited about Cheryl as a founder and how she approaches building a company.”

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

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

She gave an example of the word “fuzzy sweater”. She explained, “There’s a lot of (design-specific) terminology behind that sweater that a Midjourney doesn’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 professionals and expand into home, furniture and cosmetic product design.