Why did we Back “Neuropixel.Ai”?
Helps fashion retailers create high quality catalog images without using any models or photographers.
Founded Year: 2020
Website: https://www.neuropixel.ai/
Founders: Arvind Venugopal Nair, Amritendu Mukherjee
Raised: $916K
Backers: Huddle, Entrepreneur First, IPV, Dexter Angels, etc.
About “Neuropixel”
Across the world, small and large fashion brands as well as fashion e-commerce platforms physically and manually catalogue their latest apparels via professional photoshoots. Approximately, 100 Mn apparels are estimated to be catalogued every year.
In the Indian fashion and E-commerce industry, the apparel cataloguing process for offline and online brands is manual, intensive, and long. It takes 2-3 months for any freshly minted design, once produced, to go live on the brand’s website, an eCommerce portal, or printed in physical catalogues. For brands getting on board on a new eCommerce platform for the first time, getting their full inventory uploaded takes even longer.
NeuroPixel aims to solve the challenges through their deep tech SaaS product that lets brands and eCommerce platforms create apparel catalogs almost all digitally.
The marketplace/brand/retailer wouldn’t need to go through the manual process of sending apparel to the photo studios and can bypass professional photoshoots altogether with NeuroPixel’s solution.
Another problem that the fashion industry faces, especially in India, is high returns – as much as 20% to 40%. One of the main reasons for returns is that after buying the apparel, the consumer realizes that it doesn't fit their body type and size or skin tone as well as it fits the model who was wearing it in the images. With Neuropixel, this accuracy will lead to return percentages decreasing significantly.
An inefficient and broken cataloging journey makes it a billion-dollar photoshoot industry, ripe for disruption.
With added benefits like personalization, time-saving, cost reduction, accessibility, improvements to the bottom line, etc. NeuroPixel is at the forefront of improving efficiency for such retailers.
Additionally, there has been an explosive growth in the number of small D2C brands that look for affordable automated solutions.
What does NeuroPixel offer:
NeuroPixel aims to solve the challenges by building a deep tech, SaaS product that lets brands and eCommerce platforms create apparel catalogs digitally.
The entire manual process can be bypassed and executed in a fraction of the current time.
Why is NeuroPixel solving this problem now:
Business Requirement:
Studies have shown that presenting multiple images of the same apparel worn by multiple models (of varying age groups, ethnicity, body type and size, heights, skin tones, etc) can give the consumer a sense of how well the apparel will suit and fit them. This can lead to higher sale conversions per click and a better return-on-ad-spend ratio. However, due to prohibitive time and money costs, brands usually have to shoot apparel only with one model - and they miss out on capturing additional sales.
Personalization - Size, Ethnicity, Age:
Can improve relatability for the end consumer
Prohibitively expensive with the current workflow
The opportunity cost of 15%+ in potential revenues
Growth in D2C E-Commerce:
Next big leg of e-commerce growth from smaller D2C brands which will look for automated solutions for cost-savings plus personalization
Post-Covid World:
Delays and bottlenecks in the cataloging process
Companies are now receptive to automated solutions
Current Operational Complexity
Owing to the current manual process of cataloguing an apparel to go live on a retailer’s platform, the delay in the launch of each product leads to a 3% loss in revenues owing to non-live inwarded inventory. Additionally, considering the average rejection of 10-15% of the photographs from a manual photoshoot leads to further back and forth across multiple stakeholders and the associated downtime. This directly impacts the average cost per apparel in the US Market which can be higher due to manual inefficiencies.
Why Huddle Invested in “Neuropixel”?
NeuroPixel was born at the intersection of the deep domain expertise brought onto the table by the founders, Arvind Nair and Dr. Amritendu Mukherjee, Ph.D. They aim to help brands and fashion retailers catalogue their products better, faster and cheaper using recent advancements in Computer Vision technologies.
When we at Huddle, met the team for the first time, Arvind and Amritendu immediately seemed to be the perfect founding team because of their complementary skill sets, their domain knowledge, and the synchronization between themselves when it came to the vision of the product.
NeuroPixel has also been incubated at Entrepreneur First and is one of the 7 startups out of 30 selected for investment from the Bangalore Cohort 4.
The team is judiciously improving the technology in-house through publicly available datasets, whilst developing their sales pipeline.
As we look to work closely with the team on the execution of the plans set forth, we are bullish on them developing a superior and globally competitive product, for which the demand is clearly visible in the market.
That's all for today! A call out if you are a founder building in the Deep-tech/ SaaS space, you can reach us at connect@huddle.work and we look forward to brainstorming with you. If you are an enabler and investor and would like a further look into our ecosystem, then we are happy to dive deep into these sectors alongside you.