Viavia seeks to modernize the fashion e-commerce experience by marrying live, short-form creator-driven video content with end-to-end, AI-powered technology infrastructure for the fashion supply chain.
VIAVIA has announced an $8 million round to launch a debut fashion retail destination that will cater to Gen Z shoppers. The funding is co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Basis Set Ventures, with participation from Exor Seeds, Backend Ventures and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. The funding follows a $1.15 million seed round the company announced in February.
“Throughout my career, I have observed several changes in consumer behavior across the US and Asia. I’m particularly fascinated by the role technology has played in “exporting” content and commerce trends – we’ve seen this with TikTok in the way Gen Z engages with social media, and VIAVIA is poised to inspire the same behavioral change in the e-commerce space,” Carmen Chang, general partner and head, Asia at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), said.
“Fashion retail is undergoing a radical transformation,” he said Sixuan Li (who goes by Six), co-founder and CEO of VIAVIA. “Asian export-focused supply chains have warped the traditional timeline from an emerging trend concept to wearables. To understand this speed and volume of production, Gen Z consumers expect brands to communicate with them through authentic, creator-led. first content.”
Viavia believes that existing e-commerce platforms are ill-equipped to respond to this shift in consumer behavior and plans to change this paradigm by representing creators and influencers through an in-house talent team and heavily indexing video and streaming. directly to bring the brand story to life.
In addition to the e-commerce platform, Viavia will provide a modern technological infrastructure for fashion brands and supply chains, starting with Made in Italy. Viavia believes that Italy, which accounts for around 70 percent of all luxury apparel production, presents a massive untapped opportunity for brands outside of traditional ultra-high-end fashion houses. Luigi (Gigi) Caccia, a co-founder of Viavia and head of the company’s supply chainsaid, “Italian clothing manufacturers are the best in the world at their craft, but limited access to liquidity and rather outdated business practices mean that most manufacturers stick with a small number of tried and true customers, they leave their facilities idle the rest of the I would estimate that with the right tools, most manufacturers could increase their production by 50 percent without additional capital… the room for optimization is huge.”
Viavia’s technology solution increases order flow for local manufacturers, reducing costs for brands and shortening production times. “We are starting with 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 every level of the fashion industry,” Andrea Pasinetti, co-founder of Viavia and head of engineeringsaid.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (RR)
