Odd Concepts, an AI-based fashion tech company, has been able to attracts funds despite the Covid-19 crisis. The latest funding has increased the company’s accumulated investments to about $10million, an amount enough for Korea’s leading AI-powered fashion company to expand its growth into Asia-Pacific markets. The company holds more than 60 patents.
The company announced on March 30 that it raised $6 million in Series B funding for its outstanding PXL service and business. Participants in the funding were KB Securities, an affiliate of an existing investor; HB Investment; Kiwoom Investment-Shinhan Capital; Korea Development Bank; and SBI Investment Korea.Odd Concepts, an AI-based fashion tech company, has been able to attracts funds despite the Covid-19 crisis. The latest funding has increased the company's accumulated investments to about $10million, an amount enough for Korea's leading AI-powered fashion company to expand its growth into Asia-Pacific markets. The company holds more than 60 patents.#
Only a small number of Korean AI start-ups drew around $10 million in accumulated investments. Odd Concepts is the only AI start-up to do so in commerce. It commercialised PXL, its fashion styling service using its own machine learning technologies to recognise, analyse and search images. The service is provided to e-commerce fashion businesses.
PXL is a service that recommends personalised fashion products based on analysing products that interest consumers. The service is used by about 100 e-commerce companies in Korea and other APAC countries including Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, and Thailand. The number of monthly unique users of the PXL service tops 9 million.
Odd Concepts has learned about fashion trends analysing billions of data on consumers, products and the way users coordinate fashion that it has gathered by providing PXL as a commercial service for three years. Considering the importance of data in AI industries, Odd Concepts is spearheading the depth of its technology over the incumbents.
“We decided to invest in Odd Concepts because company’s own technology clearly verifies the class of excellence in the popular field of fashion commerce,” Jeong Seong-hoon, an assistant manager of KB Securities, said, “I expect Odd Concept’s proprietary machine learning technologies would be applied to other industries extensively.”
Earlier this year, Odd Concepts was ready to advance into the APAC markets by taking over Seacrux, a Singaporean startup expanding its APAC businesses on contextual targeting Ad system, which was leveraging applied machine learning.
“The markets have verified the needs and excellence of our service,” Odd Concepts CEO Kim Jeong-tae said, “Now is the time to increase our business in the APAC markets.”
In 2012 when Odd Concepts was established, artificial intelligence technologies were not common. It holds more than 60 patents at home and abroad.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (SV)
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