Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Infimind has closed its Series A round, bagging more than RMB 100 million (USD 14 million) from investors led by Sequoia Capital China, 36Kr reported on Wednesday.
The new funds will be used to upgrade products and attract new clients.
Wu Bin, founder of Infimind, told 36Kr that the clothing and fashion industry is a sector where standardization and digitalization rate is very low, so innovative technologies can further play a role in upgrading this traditional industry.
Infimind, which was set up in 2017, now has three products, which are called AIFashion, ECPro, and PIM respectively.
AIFashion’s key technologies, including clothing recognition, labeling, and smart recommendations, have been integrated into e-commerce platform JD.com, social e-commerce unicorn Xiaohongshu, also known as Red, and second-hand luxury e-commerce site Plum, according to Infimind’s official website.
Based on image recognition technologies, ECPro can help clothing vendors to automatically generate item descriptions with both text information and photos, saving human efforts. Infimind said ECPro can be used by retailers on Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, without disclosing how many vendors are currently using this service.
Furthermore, PIM is a decision-aiding platform that hosts different data generated during the manufacturing process in plants.
While artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be the flavor of the day, companies are still trying to find real-world applications, and at the same time, AI firms are actively looking to raise enough money to aid their ambitions.
Chinese AI companies raised USD 15.7 billion (RMB 105.8 billion) in 262 investment rounds in 2018, with the average amount collected topping USD 60 million, according to a report by China-based think tank Wuzhen Institute. The fundraising was times larger than the country’s AI market size of USD 1.76 billion in the same year.
Chinese companies’ financing made up for more than 93% of investments in AI throughout Asia, and nearly 47% of global financing in the field, according to the Wuzhen Institute report, which said that global AI companies have raised USD 78.5 billion in total as of 2018.
Profitability is still far away from most companies in this industry, including top players Megvii, which made RMB 5.2 billion (USD 732.5 billion) in net losses in the first half of 2019.
Infimind told 36Kr that it predicts to gain over 200 clients to turn profitable by the end of this year.
36Kr is KrASIA’s parent company