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The world of fashion is moving faster every year. Most retailers introduce new styles every season, and fast fashion companies like Shein, H&M, and Zara are constantly updating their collections. To keep up with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers are turning to technology to speed up the design process.
Raspberry AIfounded two years ago, the startup is one of the tech solutions that helps accelerate product development by allowing designers to visualize and iterate on their ideas almost instantly with its text-to-image platform.
Rasberry founder Cheryl Liu, a private equity analyst at KKR who focused on retail before working at Amazon and DoorDash, saw an opportunity to apply generative AI to fashion design right after vision models like Open AI. DALL-E and Stability AI‘s stable diffusion became available at the end of 2022.
“For the first time in history, you can rapidly 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 would often have to order physical samples to visualize their ideas, which would take weeks.
Another alternative was to use older computer-aided design tools such as Browzwear and Adobe Photoshop.
But with Raspberry, designers can turn their sketches into photorealistic images, as seen on the brand’s website. According to Liu, these images can help brands decide whether they want to produce a product.
“You can see the same basic fabric in a lot of different materials and prints,” she said. “No company is going to order 50 different sample iterations of a product, but now they can see 50 different iterations of a design.”
The product quickly became popular among brands. Today, Raspberry has 70 clients, including fashion houses such as sports brand Under Armour, Groupo Teddy, an Italian manufacturer with 8,840 stores in 39 countries, and luxury designer MCM Worldwide.
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 nearly 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 Bryan Kim, a partner at the firm. “We met with a lot of companies and were excited about Cheryl as a founder and how she approaches building a company.”
Of course, it helped that Raspberry had “very, very large and important customers,” Kim added.
Although Liu admits that Raspberry competes with other AI image generators such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Adobe Firefly, the main reason professional designers choose his company’s product is its ability to understand and accurately interpret industry terminology.
He gave the example of the word “fuzzy sweater”. He explained, “There’s a lot of (design-specific) terminology behind that sweater that 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 its design of home, furniture and cosmetics products.
