Mad Street Den, the maker of Vue.ai, a platform for intelligent retail automation, today announced it has raised a $17 million Series B led by Falcon Edge Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India and Global Brain, a GP of KDDI Innovation Fund.

The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $27.5 million. After experiencing a fourfold annual revenue increase, the funds will be used to grow the team, deliver on the product roadmap and scale the company’s existing customer base that already includes leading retailers from across the globe like Macy’s, Mercadolibre and Tata.

Last September, the AI startup had received undisclosed amount in strategic investment from KIDDI Corporation of Tokyo, Japan. The funds have been routed through KIDDI’s investment arm, KDDI Open Innovation Fund 2, managed by Global Brain.

Retailers have entered an era where consumers expect a seamless brand experience thanks to behemoths like Amazon and Alibaba who are using AI to personalize products and services for shoppers. The battle to stay competitive comes at a tremendous cost to retailers who are projected to spend more than $7B billion on AI over the next 3 years. By offering a one-stop shop across the value chain, Vue.ai is the first AI solution to automate critical functions across departments heavily dependent on human intuition, unifying data about products, people and processes.

Vue.ai combines seven different products to offer retailers a unified system used as a ‘neural network’ for decision-making. Using a centralized data brain, the platform digitally maps a retail product’s DNA, then translates product information into language that teams can easily understand. With better accuracy and insights, retailers can easily decode the qualities of their merchandise, make intelligent updates on the fly, and deliver unique experiences along every step of the customer journey.

“The future of retail is entertainment. The experience economy we see today is the start of that era,” said Ashwini Asokan, CEO and Founder of Vue.ai. “Brands are shifting to designing worlds that consumers want to be a part of and that has to integrate with the new ways people shop. Vue is the electricity that powers all these complicated and important retail functions so retailers can focus on the business of entertaining you"

"The Vue.ai team is on a mission to put AI and intelligent automation in the hands of teams across the globe in ways that improve productivity and growth multi-fold,” said Anandamoy Roychowdhary, CTO and Director of Sequoia Capital India. “We’ve seen incredible growth in how they’ve brought this value across multiple functions in the retail industry in just two years since we started this journey with them. Sequoia India is excited to partner with Falcon Edge in this round, enabling Ashwini and Anand to scale Vue.ai globally.”

California-headquartered firm which has an office in Chennai, Vue.ai was launched by husband-wife duo - Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran in 2016 as the first AI brand from its parent company Mad Street Den. The team is comprised of neuroscientists and AI experts from IBM, Intel and DARPA. The company serves major retailers across the US, UK, India, Middle East and Latin America.

The company has recently announced Human Model Generator, an AI that can generate garment-to-model images & predict how the garment fits.
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