Funding for Lily AI, New Dean of SCAD, Royal Perfume of Penhaligon

NEW FUNDING: Lily AI, a product attribute platform that ensures fashion companies and consumers speak the same language, has closed a $25 million Series B funding round.

The round saw participation from new and established investors including Canaan Partners, Conductive Ventures, Sorenson Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

The new financial backing is intended to support the California-based startup's plans to further expand its business in mid-market retail e-commerce brands; diversify into home and beauty, and expand geographically, with an eye towards the UK and Europe. It also plans to offer other apps within the retail stack.

Lily AI was created in 2015 by entrepreneurs Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan and Purva Gupta as an emotional intelligence app for fashion shoppers, with initial funding from investors such as Unshackled Ventures, a fund of start-up venture capital for immigrants. founded start-ups.

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Initially, the female-led company sought to create an emotional intelligence-based shopping experience, available through an iOS app, that used machine learning to understand consumers' preferences and body perception. a woman in order to offer confidence-boosting recommendations.

Its seed funding round led by NEA and Unshackled Ventures raised $2 million. In 2020, it secured $12.5 million in Series A funding from Canaan Partners, NEA, and Fernbrook Capital Management, enabling the company to transition from its previous app-based solution to a enterprise products which focuses on building customer-centric product taxonomies to improve e-commerce site search, demand forecasting, merchandise planning, product recommendations and discovery, as well as search engine optimization and marketing.

“Consumer language is essentially where we use deep image recognition technology [and] state-of-the-art AI capabilities [to] read images and text, extracting attributes that matter to the end consumer", Gupta, general manager of the company officer, explained to WWD.

An example of product attributes extrapolated by Lily AI technologies. Courtesy of Lily AI

Gupta said the Series B funding is coming "at an interesting point where we've proven with the first apps [where] we were able to solve a technology problem through image recognition." He then showed fashion companies the impact that feeding the resulting product attributes could have in the short term, which the executive estimated at up to 10% of a company's revenue. It counts , Gap Inc., Macy's and ThredUp among its US-based customers, and the executive said they were in talks with "a very large UK-based retailer".

The key takeaway from what Purva saw as a "really good product validation and market fit" phase is that "it's become very clear that product attributes are really underutilized, which represents a huge opportunity for retail,” she continued. , taxonomies developed using Lily AI could impact the entire retail value chain, influencing everything from product assortments to written copy in product descriptions.

Gupta said that Lily AI was a solitary player who catered...