lightspeed venture partners

Smartex sews up $24.7M to put smarter eyes on textile manufacturing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Climate, Hardware, lightspeed venture partners, manufacturing, Smartex, textile manufacturingNo Comments

A lot of things might spring to mind when you hear “fashion,” but taking care of the planet generally isn’t on that list. Smartex just raised a couple of bolts’ worth of cash, sowing up a round of funding to bring smart tech to fabric manufacturing. The hope is to be able to detect textile defects in real time. The company is pushing hard on the green angle for its products. Smartex has developed machine-vision-driven software that makes fabric production more efficient by identifying defects, which primarily can be used to stop manufacturing if something is going wrong, preventing waste. In particular, the company argues that imperfect fabric can travel down the supply chain, with product issues only getting discovered much later in the manufacturing process. “I was born and raised by textile factory workers, I worked in factories when I was a teenager, I have a master’s in physics and the textile industry has been chasing me since ever,” said Gilberto Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Smartex, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “We co-founded Smartex because we’re obsessed with solving problems — and the textile industry has big ones. It’s probably the industry with the worst ratio size / automation. Textile factories don’t have the tools to produce in a clean, transparent, efficient way… generating massive amounts of waste and other problems.” The company declined to share the valuation of its $24.7 million round, but told ZebethMedia it was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tony Fadell’s Build Collective. Additional funds were raised from clothing giant H&M Group, DCVC, SOSV’s HAX, Spider Capital, Momenta Ventures, Bombyx Capital Partners and Fashion for Good. The company previously raised a $2.9 million seed round in 2019 co-led by DCVC and Spider Capital. Smartex’ founders, Antonio Rocha, CTO & Co-Founder, Gilberto Loureiro, CEO & Co-Founder, and Paulo Ribeiro, VP of Engineering & Co-Founder. Image Credits: Smartex. “It’s fantastic to work with such mentors that have invaluable experience. Lightspeed Ventures is a truly global firm and supports us in many geographies we operate, Paul [Murphy from Lightspeed VP] is also an operator with tremendous insights in scaling businesses,” said Loureiro, “Tony Fadell and his team are world-class mentors and operators with a unique product and marketing approach. Tony’s recent book “BUILD” is one of our bibles.” These Series A funds will enable Smartex to expand the business to new geographies and to continue to grow the team. “I’m so excited about textile production in Asia and all the mega-factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, etc. No one will ever solve textile problems without having a deep understanding and presence in these markets. So, going into all the cultural aspects and making businesses here is really awesome,” said Loureiro. “Our ultimate vision and long-term goal is to expand into other industries to enable factories around the world to produce with significantly less waste. We won’t stop until we have made a massive difference.” It takes a rather sturdy stomach to take on an entrenched industry where a lot of the manufacturing facilities don’t have the necessary infrastructure to run AI-powered QA, but it’s a changing industry. “This industry is very challenging! That’s one of the reasons why few tech companies operate in here. We feel blessed to be already creating a massive impact — but when compared with the overall size of the industry, it feels like nothing,” Loureiro explains. “If there was ever a time to solve massive problems — it’s now!”

GlobalFair secures new cash to simplify procuring construction materials • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Commerce, construction tech, GlobalFair, india quotient, lightspeed venture partners, StartupsNo Comments

The construction materials market is fragmented, according to GlobalFair CEO Shaily Garg, because it involves layers of both supply chain and logistics complexities. In a 2021 survey for the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo, the vast majority of builders said that the time it takes to obtain materials — and the cost of materials — continue to be the top issues they face. Garg posits that technology can help, which is why she launched GlobalFair in 2020 with Ashish Chandra. A business-to-business startup, GlobalFair aims to simplify the procurement of “ready-to-install” materials such as countertops, quartz countertops, cabinets, natural stones and tiles with a digital marketplace for U.S. construction contractors. GlobalFair today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed — a mix of equity ($12 million) and debt ($8 million) — with participation from Saama Capital, India Quotient, AUM Ventures and Stride Ventures. It brings the company’s total raised to $22 million following a $2 million seed round last February. “The idea of GlobalFair was something Chandra and I felt strongly about, given the fragmented nature of construction businesses,” Garg said. “Across the world, global supply chain challenges are resulting in construction delays and labor shortages.” Garg says she developed an interest in construction at an early age. Her family owned a quartz manufacturing business and she was trained as an engineer, going on to work for P&G prior to founding GlobalFair after stints at PwC and TransUnion. Chandra is also an engineer with an infrastructure consulting background, having worked as a director at PwC India and co-founded TrueCover, a startup creating blockchain-based insurance tools. With GlobalFair, Garg and Chandra drew on their technical backgrounds to create a platform with predictive modeling capabilities. While the platform’s flagship product is a marketplace that connects contractors, distributors, fabricators, architects and construction companies to procure materials, GlobalFair also offers a tool to automate construction material cost estimates from architectural plans and site shop drawings. Beyond this, the company hosts a material visualization app to help architects and designers anticipate how things might look once installed, as well as an automated enterprise resource planning system to — in Garg’s works — “enable swift response time for customers and suppliers across multiple geographies.” “[W]e have created an end-to-end synchronized supply chain from discovery to the final delivery of materials at a customer’s doorstep,” Garg said. “Our one-stop-shop platform is transformational for supply-side manufacturing, opening up the pockets of manufacturing that exist in India, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries for the global markets. We aim to become the largest technology-first global supplier of building materials, providing an easy, cost-efficient and seamless cross-border procurement experience for construction contractors.” To this end, GlobalFair claims to be working with “hundreds” of contractors and retail customers across the U.S., specifically for multifamily and hospitality projects with budgets ranging from $100 million to $500 million. Garg says that GlobalFair’s clientele runs the gamut from big manufacturers and local distributors, to exporters, to retail chains buying from distributors. Garg attributes the company’s recent success in part to the pandemic and the subsequent supply chain chaos. A report from Buildertrend found that the average number of days of delays more than doubled in 2022 compared to last year — a result of volatile material costs, shipping backlogs and scarce labor. Construction tech startups have broadly benefited from the tailwinds over the past two years. In H1 2022, alone, funding in the sector totaled $1.3 billion, according to Pitchbook — up 44% from H2 2021. “COVID-19 has had a seismic impact on global production networks, such that logistics costs and existing supply chains have altered fundamentally,” Garg said. “Businesses today are more worried about the resilience of their supply chains and are therefore looking to expand their supplier networks … At GlobalFair, we are disintermediating the long cross-border supply chain, connecting contractors directly to the suppliers.” Garg claims that GlobalFair is maintaining “unit profitability” despite the current economic uncertainty, having seen “strong customer pull and growth” between the seed and Series A rounds. The new capital will be put toward growing the company’s team (from around 100 people to more than 200 by mid-2023), building products and scaling GlobalFair’s tech offering to new markets, she said. Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia shared via email: “The pandemic created stress in supply chains across industries, heightening the need for transparency, visibility and geographic diversification in the global procurement of construction products and building materials. By using technology to stitch together a network of manufacturing facilities across India and South East Asia, GlobalFair enables buyers in any country to discover new supply in an efficient, transparent and secure electronic market.”

Trendsi secures $25M to help sellers and manufacturers predict demand • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in artificial intelligence, Commerce, eCommerce, lightspeed venture partners, startup, Startups, TrendsiNo Comments

In the traditional business-to-business world, sellers often don’t know how much of a product they should order. Even at well-run companies, anywhere from 20% to 30% of inventory is either dead (i.e. doesn’t sell) or obsolete, according to one source. The impact on profitability can be quite severe. Dead stock costs sellers and manufacturers as much as 11% of their revenue, reports Katana, which develops raw material and bills of material tracking software. Seeking to give sellers greater visibility over product demand, so they can make more informed decisions, Ella Zhang co-founded Trendsi, which connects sellers with suppliers while managing the back-end supply chain for its customer base. After gaining traction during the pandemic as many retail businesses made the risk-reducing pivot to selling goods directly to retail, rather than buying inventory, Trendsi has closed a $25 million Series A round that brings its total capital raised to $30 million. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the tranche, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, Footwork VC, Peterson Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and individual investors, including Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma. Zhang tells ZebethMedia that the new cash will be put toward investments in data infrastructure, supply chain technology, new merchandise categories and international expansion. “We are building a new platform that lowers the barrier for anyone to start selling online or offline,” Zhang told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “With Trendsi … influencers, creators, and more can sell via social networks without worrying about sourcing products, managing warehouse, packaging and shipping, etc., so that they can focus on what they love: their brand and customers.” Image Credits: Trendsi Zhang came from the venture world, serving as an investment director at Kleiner Perkins after stints at Google, Tencent and Binance (where she founded the startup’s investment arm, Binance Labs). Zhang met Trendsi’s second co-founder, Sherwin Xia, while a postgrad at Stanford, where the two participated in the Stanford Startup Garage incubator. Xia was one of the first employees at e-scooter startup Lime and previously worked as an analyst at a16z (Andreessen Horowitz). Zhang, Xia and Trendsi’s third co-founder, Maddie Davidson, sought with Trendsi to build a service that applies AI and machine learning to streamline tasks like inventory and sales forecasting. Using data collected on the platform and from third parties, Trendsi attempts to predict sales down to the SKU level, so that sellers can reduce excess inventory and ideally prevent out-of-stock issues. Beyond this, the platform taps sales and behavioral data to curate and recommend products to sellers. Recently, Trendsi launched a feature it calls “just-in-time” manufacturing, which aims to help manufacturers quickly restock based on real-time sales data and predictions. “[This] allows retailers to only take minimum and no inventory risk by building our inventory and sales forecasting models and offering the drop-shipping service,” Zhang explained. “The original upfront risk of buying inventory is now shared among retailers, Trendsi platform and the manufacturers.” Despite competition from inventory optimization startups like Flieber, Syrup Tech and Black Crow AI, business has been robust over the two years since Trendsi’s founding, Zhang claims, with new user growth up 10x year-over-year. (She declined to give a figure.) Over the next year, the company plans to expand its work with sellers and manufacturers in industries where it sees strong upward momentum, specifically home decor, accessories and makeup. “For both our suppliers and retailers, especially in fast fashion, overstock means locked-in capital, wastage of storage space, increased inventory holding costs and unnecessary losses,” Zhang said. “This pandemic has revealed the real costs associated with inventory mismanagement. So Trendsi actually gained traction.” San Francisco-based Trendsi currently has 105 full-time employees and expects to hire 15 more by the end of the year. Not all retailers are climbing aboard the AI train. Nearly half of respondents to a KPMG survey cited cybersecurity breaches and possible bias as their top concerns about the technology, while 75% said they believe AI is more “of hype than reality.” But broadly speaking, AI in retail is a burgeoning category, with the vast majority of retailers participating in the survey saying their employees are prepared — and have the skills — for AI adoption. Retail business leaders expect AI will have the biggest impact in customer intelligence, inventory management and chatbots for customer service, creating a virtuous adoption-investment cycle in the coming years.