ViSenze dresses to impress Rakuten

Rakuten, a Japan-based fashion retailer, has led a $3.5m series A round backing National University of Singapore fashion spin-out ViSenze.

Investment firms Walden International and UOB Venture Management also participated in the round.

The investment, which was made via Rakuten’s corporate venture capital arm Rakuten Ventures, builds on a partnership between the two firms which started last year. As part of that deal, ViSenze will make its fashion finder application technology available to Rakuten, so customers can upload pictures of fashion items they’ve seen and find a matching item for sale on ViSenze’s store.

Similar apps, which allow users to take pictures of clothing and accessories, is being developed and implemented by numerous organisations around the world. On campuses, Canada’s York University recently sold computer vision technology to Canadian fashion app Slyce to improve the accuracy of search results generated via the fashion snaps. And over in Ireland, Dublin City University spin-out Style-Eyes was named “one to watch” by state-owned development organisation Enterprise Ireland for similar technology. Online retailer Amazon has also recently added a shopping-by-camera function to its app for iPhone, allowing users to compare items in regular stores with prices for the same items online.

Oliver Tan, CEO and co-founder of ViSenze, said: “We are very excited to have Rakuten, WI and UOBVM backing us; their international network will help us scale faster. We will invest in accelerating the development of our own in-video visual recognition technology and are currently engaging key players in North America and China, two of our priority markets.”