AI Startup ZMO.ai Secures $8M in Round-A Financing

ZMO.ai, an artificial intelligence enterprise, announced on Wednesday that it has recently completed A-round financing totaling $8 million, led by Hillhouse Capital. GGV Capital and GSR Ventures, which had previously served as the startup’s angel investors, also participated in this round of financing.

ZMO.ai was founded in 2020, focusing on creating virtual models to display clothing through powerful AI algorithms. Merchants no longer need to spend significant time, energy and money to find models, shoot pictures and post-edit them. The costs of putting products on shelves can reportedly be reduced by 80%.

The core team members of ZMO.ai come from Google, Apple, Facebook, SenseTime, Adobe, Tencent and other first-line internet companies in China and abroad. The research team has published more than 40 papers in top-level conferences and journals related to computer vision in the past five years.

Ella Zhang, CEO and co-founder of ZMO.ai, was formerly a Google AR system architect, mainly responsible for the algorithm and architecture of Glass, Reflector and other projects. Before joining Google, Zhang was a core member of the founding team of the Apple Air Pods product line.

“Traditionally, the entire cycle of garment manufacturing may take two to three months, from design, fabric selection, pattern making, modeling, to actually hitting the shelves. We are flipping and shortening that process. Customers can now test a piece of clothing by putting it on a virtual model, which can go on the website. Once orders come in, the e-commerce customer can start manufacturing,” said Zhang.

SEE ALSO: AR Smart Glasses Brand INMO Bags $10M in Round-A Financing

Zhang added that ZMO.ai is discussing potential cooperation with fast fashion giant SHEIN, which launches 2,000-3,000 new products every day. Looking ahead, ZMO.ai plans to apply GPT-3, which uses big data and deep learning to imitate the natural language patterns of humans, to create speeches for models.