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

The fashion world moves at a faster pace every year. Most retailers introduce new styles every season, and fast fashion companies like Shein, H&M and Zara constantly update their collections. To keep up with the rapid demand for new styles, brands and manufacturers are turning to technology to speed up their design process.

Raspberry aia startup founded two years ago, is a technology solution that helps accelerate product development by allowing designers to visualize and iterate their ideas almost instantly through a text-to-image platform.

Rasberry founder Cheryl Liu, who was a private equity analyst at KKR focused on retail before working at Amazon and DoorDash, saw an opportunity to apply generative AI to fashion design right after image models like Open AI’s DALL-E and Stability AIStable deployment becomes available in late 2022.

“For the first time in history, you can quickly create hundreds of designs in a way you couldn’t do before,” Liu told TechCrunch. She explained that before the advent of generative AI, designers often had to request physical samples to visualize their ideas, which could take weeks.

Another alternative was to use older computer-aided design tools like Browzwear and Adobe’s Photoshop.

But with Raspberry, designers can turn their drawings into realistic images exactly as they appear on the brand’s website. These images can help brands decide whether to make the product, according to Liu.

“You can see the same foundational piece in a lot of different materials and prints,” she said. “No company would order 50 different iterations of one sample for one product, but now they can see 50 different iterations of one design.”

The product quickly became popular with brands. Today, Raspberry counts 70 clients, including fashion houses such as sports brand Under Armour, Grupo Teddy, an Italian manufacturer with 8,840 stores in 39 countries, and luxury designer MCM Worldwide.

This rapid growth has 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 could speed up the fashion manufacturing process, said Brian Kim, a partner at the company. “We met with several companies and were excited about Cheryl as a founder and how she approaches building a company.”

Of course, it also helps that Raspberry has “very prominent, very large, very important customers,” Kim added.

While Liu acknowledged that Raspberry competes with other AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly, the main reason professional designers choose her company’s product is its ability to accurately understand and interpret industry terminology.

She gave the example of the word “fuzzy jacket.” “There’s a lot of (design-specific) terminology behind that jacket that Midjourney doesn’t know about,” she explained.

Another design-specific feature offered by Raspberry is the ability to create images from drawings.

Raspberry will use the funding to hire engineering, sales and marketing professionals and expand into home, furniture and cosmetics product design.