True Fit, a Boston-area startup that is creating “a genome for apparel and footwear,” announced this morning a Series C investment of $55 million.
Georgian Partners led the funding round with participation from existing investors Jump Capital, Signal Peak Ventures, and Intel Capital, along with new investor Cross Creek Capital.
“We’ve built a preference map of what they love and how they love to wear things,” says William Adler, True Fit’s CEO, referring to apparel shoppers. “It’s not just fit, but also color, style, fabric.”
By the end of next year, True Fit, which he says works with thousands of fashion brands and 200 retail sites in the United States and Europe, aims to have 70 percent of the $2 trillion apparel market mapped out by a variety of details, including sleeve lengths and details like placement of zippers. “We can predict what people will love, not just what fits but what they will love,” Adler added.
TrueFit uses analytics and artificial intelligence to analyze manufacturing design data from apparel and footwear brands with anonymized consumer order data from retailers, along with personal preference data from tens of millions of registered True Fit users. This process allows brands and retailers to understand and make personalized recommendations to individual shoppers—thereby increasing the likelihood of a sale and reducing returns.
In the age of Amazon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]) dominating the retail sector, such technologies could give more traditional retailers an edge to compete. “The data platform enables retailers to be more personal and offer more white glove service” to customers, Adler says.
The new investment dollars are going to be used in part to build an “outfit builder” tool, a digital assistant that could give shoppers ideas of fit and style and encourage the purchase of more than one item.
True Fit was founded in 2007 by Babson College graduates, and last raised $25 million in July 2016. Today, the company has 110 employees and has raised a total of $95 million.
Given True Fit’s growth, I asked Adler if an exit was in the near future and whether a likely acquirer would be a major retailer—or an e-commerce firm. He insists that’s not what’s on the front burner for now. True Fit is expanding its customer base into Asia and South America this year, he says.
“Right now we’re focused on building a data platform for the biggest consumer vertical; that’s where our focus is,” he says. “We’ll see down the road.”
