Early stage funding firm Antler Australia lately backed a brand new cohort of startups as a part of its ongoing program to construct nice native tech corporations.
Startup Day by day is sharing the main points of every enterprise within the “Antler Investor Memos” sequence, which is designed to present you a fast, sharp understanding of the startups and other people concerned, with many searching for comply with up capital following Antler’s preliminary pre-seed funding.
Firm: SeeStone
Based: June 2024
Stage: Pre-seed
Founders: Nilufer Haksever (CEO) and Josh Leask (CTO)
Present buyers: Antler
At the moment elevating: Sure
The Enterprise
The style business is among the world’s largest moral, financial, and environmental challenges. Producing 92 million tonnes of textile waste yearly and accounting for practically 10% of world carbon emissions, style is in a perpetual state of oversupply pushed by fleeting developments, social media, and client urge for food.
Should you suppose the water footprint of almond milk is unhealthy, flip to your wardrobe, the place a single cotton shirt can take as much as 700 gallons of water to provide.
Exterior of consumerism, one of many key causes behind this pervasive concern is that style retailers face fixed stress to ship novelty, launching recent collections with restricted historic information to information shopping for selections. With no direct information factors to match, retailers should depend on intestine intuition and fragmented info, resulting in unsold inventory, missed gross sales, and finally, misplaced income.
SeeStone’s mission is to eradicate the guesswork, and inefficiency inherent in seasonal shopping for selections and cut back the monetary and environmental burdens of overproduction.
The platform empowers retailers to make acutely aware buying selections utilizing AI that analyzes huge quantities of information to ship optimised predictions for retail shopping for selections even for solely new merchandise. This AI shortly identifies hidden patterns in client behaviour, lowering human bias, and eradicating guesswork to make sure higher stock alignment and extra worthwhile gross sales outcomes—all whereas lowering waste.
In flip, SeeStone’s platform drives gross sales progress, reduces extra inventory, and will increase revenue margins. The result’s a extra worthwhile and sustainable method to retail shopping for that may assist style retailers keep aggressive with out contributing to overproduction and waste.
Antler funding thesis
“Every year, as much as 40% of garments go unsold, and the inventory that goes to landfill prices retailers $500 billion yearly. Whereas the size of the issue is big, so is the chance, and SeeStone’s AI-powered platform has the potential to change into an indispensable software to sort out this,” says Mike Abbott, Common Accomplice at Antler in Australia
“By analyzing tens of millions of information factors concurrently, SeeStone’s AI can predict at a scale that human consumers can’t. We see the founders, Nilufer and Josh, as the right match due to their area experience and technical prowess. That is key to serving to SeeStone unlock a extra sustainable and worthwhile future for style retail.”
Traction/milestones
Since its formation, SeeStone has made main developments together with a profitable pilot with main style retailer Brie Leon, the place SeeStone’s AI predicted the gross sales portions for merchandise that had by no means been offered earlier than. The outcome was a 33% enchancment over preliminary gross sales forecasts, demonstrating the platform’s accuracy – even with out the interior information there to help it – and potential for scalable influence.
Following this success, SeeStone secured two further pilot applications with well-known style manufacturers, every representing completely different buyer archetypes.
SeeStone has additionally established strategic partnerships with organisations that align with its mission, equivalent to Thread Collectively, a non-profit that addresses style’s waste disaster by redistributing surplus inventory. SeeStone plans to collaborate with Thread Collectively within the new 12 months to additional cut back style waste, deepening its dedication to creating a long-lasting environmental influence.
SeeStone has launched its MVP which integrates straight with retailers’ present ERP programs. The platform gives key options designed to optimise shopping for selections, equivalent to AI-driven suggestions for first-time product buys, from deciding on the best merchandise to quantifying purchases and forecasting weekly gross sales – all inside seconds. It additionally gives pricing benchmarks and flags potential errors, enabling retailers to make quicker, smarter, and extra worthwhile shopping for selections whereas lowering overproduction and waste. With the MVP out there, SeeStone plans to increase and scale its resolution within the coming 12 months.
Newest funding
Pre-Seed from Antler
Use of Funds
SeeStone’s preliminary funding from Antler has been used to develop the MVP, conduct pilot applications with main style manufacturers, and construct crucial business partnerships.
The funding may also allow the corporate to rent key expertise, significantly in product improvement and information science, to help platform progress.
Further funds might be used to reinforce the platform’s enterprise options, increase its consumer base, and proceed refining its AI expertise to align with its objective of constructing a product that may serve giant, multinational style retailers.
The founders say
“SeeStone’s journey started with Antler – the anchor that introduced our cofounding staff collectively, which has since change into our largest asset,” says CEO Nilufer Haksever.
“Whereas we each had the talents and data in our particular person domains, Antler supplied the platform for us to search out one another and align our complementary strengths. Past that, Antler was key to sharpening our focus and figuring out the actual ache factors to unravel, guaranteeing that SeeStone delivers most influence and worth.
“Vogue is among the most wasteful industries on the planet, and overproduction is on the coronary heart of the issue. Our platform addresses this concern straight by serving to retailers make optimised, data-driven shopping for selections that cut back waste and improve profitability. It’s about making a extra sustainable future for the style business, and we’re proud to be main that cost.”
“The style retail business, identified for its information depth and the mantra ‘retail is element,’ is completely poised for disruption and able to reap the advantages of AI.”
What’s subsequent?
Antler, a world early-stage VC, is revealing its newest investments in bold Australian founders and startups. With over 120 investments in early-stage corporations, SeeStone is certainly one of its most up-to-date portfolio corporations.
Founders can apply right here to Antler’s subsequent residency in Australia commencing February 2025 in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
- StartupDaily is the official media associate of Antler in Australia.
