The world of style is transferring at a quicker tempo every year. Most retailers introduce new types every season, and fast-fashion corporations like Shein, H&M, and Zara replace their collections constantly. To maintain tempo with the fast demand for brand new types, manufacturers and producers have been turning to tech to speed up their design course of.
Raspberry AI, a startup based two years in the past, is without doubt one of the technological options that helps expedite product improvement by permitting designers to visualise and iterate their concepts almost immediately with its text-to-image platform.
Rasberry’s founder Cheryl Liu, who was a personal fairness analyst at KKR centered on retail earlier than working for Amazon and DoorDash, noticed a possibility to use generative AI to style design proper after picture fashions like Open AI’s DALL-E and Stability AI‘s steady diffusion turned accessible in late 2022.
“For the first time in history, you could rapidly create hundreds of designs in a way that you could never do before,” Liu instructed TechCrunch. She defined that earlier than generative AI, designers would usually must order bodily samples to visualise their concepts, which might take weeks.
The opposite various was to make use of older computer-aided design instruments like Browzwear and Adobe’s Photoshop.
However with Raspberry designers can flip their sketches into photo-realistic photos simply as they would seem on the model’s web site. These photos might help manufacturers resolve in the event that they wish to manufacture the product, in keeping with Liu.
“You can see the same foundational piece in a lot of different materials and prints,” she mentioned. “No company is going to order 50 different sample iterations for one single product, but now they can see 50 different iterations of a single design.”
The product rapidly turned widespread with manufacturers. Right this moment, Raspberry counts 70 clients, together with style homes like athletic model Beneath Armour, Gruppo Teddy, an Italian producer with 8,840 shops throughout 39 nations, and luxurious designer MCM Worldwide.
Such quick development has helped Raspberry elevate a $24 million Collection A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the participation of current traders Greycroft, Correlation Ventures, and MVP Ventures. The funding comes about 10 months after the startup’s $4.5 million seed spherical.
Andreessen Horowitz was excited by investing in an AI firm that may speed up the style manufacturing course of, mentioned Bryan Kim, a associate on the agency. “We had met with multiple companies and got excited about Cheryl as a founder and how she approaches building a company.”
In fact, it additionally helped that Raspberry has “marquee clients that are very, very large and important,” Kim added.
Whereas Liu acknowledged that Raspberry competes with different AI picture mills like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly, a key motive why skilled designers select her firm’s product is its capacity to know and precisely interpret industry-specific terminology.
She gave an instance of the phrase “fuzzy sweater.” She defined: “There’s a lot of terminology behind that sweater that a Midjourney does not know.”
One other design-specific function that Raspberry presents is the flexibility to create photos from sketches.
Raspberry will use the funding to rent engineering, gross sales, and advertising and marketing professionals and increase into house, furnishings, and cosmetics product design.
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