Viavia seeks to modernize the fashion e-commerce experience by marrying creator-driven live and short-form video content with an end-to-end AI-powered technology infrastructure for the fashion supply chain.
VIAVIA has announced an $8 million seed round to launch the first fashion retail destination geared toward Gen Z shoppers. The funding is co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Basis Seth Ventures, with participation from Exor Seeds, Back Ventures and Andrew Ng AI Fund. The funding follows a $1.15 million pre-seed round the company announced in February.
“In my work, I have seen many changes in consumer behavior across the US and Asia. I’m particularly impressed by the role technology has played in ‘exporting’ content and business trends – we’ve seen with Tik Tok how Gen Z interacts with social media and VIAVIA to inspire a similar behavioral change in the e-commerce space.” Carmen Chang, General Partner and Head, Asia at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) said.
“Fashion retail is undergoing radical change,” he said. Sixuan Li (who goes by six), founder and CEO of VIAVIA. “Export-focused Asian supply chains have disrupted the traditional timeline from emerging trend concepts to wearables. To make sense of this speed and scale of production, Gen Z consumers expect brands to connect with them through authentic, creatively-led and video-first content.”
Viavia believes that existing e-commerce platforms are ill-equipped to respond to this shift in consumer behavior, and plans to change that paradigm, representing creators and influencers with an in-house talent pool and indexing extensively across video and live streaming to bring brand awareness. Stories to life.
In addition to the e-commerce platform, Viavia provides modern technology infrastructure for fashion brands and supply chains, starting with Made in Italy. Viavia Italy, which accounts for ~70 percent of luxury apparel production, believes that Italy presents a huge untapped opportunity for brands outside of traditional ultra-high-end fashion houses. Luigi (Gigi) Cascia, founder of Viavia and head of the company’s supply chain“Italian clothing manufacturers are the best in the world in their craftsmanship, but due to limited access to liquidity, and poor business practices, most manufacturers follow a small number of real customers, leaving their factories idle. I estimate that with the right tools, most manufacturers can increase their production by 50 percent without additional capex… the room for optimization is huge.
Viavia’s technology solutions increase order flow for local manufacturers, reduce costs for brands and shorten product lead times. “We’re launching a new AI-powered product lifecycle management tool, and using this to efficiently connect designers and brands with manufacturers in Italy and beyond. Our mission is to use technology to eliminate process friction for creatives at all levels of the fashion industry.” Andrea Pacinetti, Viavia founder and head of engineeringHe said.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)
