Across PI’s 2025 global event series, we featured the Start-up Tech Showcases; fast-paced sessions which gave emerging technology companies a platform to step onto the stage and share what they’re building. From AI-driven design intelligence and 3D-enabled workflows, to fit science, forecasting, digital selling, and on-demand manufacturing, the startups featured reflected the extraordinary breadth and growing maturity of innovation shaping the industry.
Drawing on a mix of shared insights, live pitches, and publicly available work, this piece offers a snapshot of the tools, platforms, and ideas pushing fashion toward smarter, more connected, and more human-centred systems.
(A) Design Futures & Creative Intelligence
AI, 3D, and automation reshaping how creative ideas are generated, validated, and turned into product.
1. ADAIQ
ADAIQ is an AI-driven product intelligence platform that unifies consumer, retail, manufacturing, and supplier data to help brands design products consumers actually want, faster and with greater commercial confidence.
Built for product creation teams, its proprietary design evaluation engine analyses visual and textual concept data to predict market performance early, replacing guesswork with validated insight.
By enabling designers, developers, merchandisers, and product leaders to collaborate from concept through prototyping in a single platform, ADAIQ reduces product failure, accelerates decision-making, and drives higher-margin, data-backed product lines.
What’s next? The team is advancing its purpose-built agentic AI platform with a redesigned, role-specific interface and continuously evolving predictive models to further strengthen validation and commercial decision-making.
Find out more: Timothy Penasack, ADAIQ
2. athena studio
athena studio is an AI-native operating system for fashion design and product teams, automatically capturing, structuring, and synchronising product data across tools, teams, and conversations.
Embedded directly into existing workflows like chat, email, and PLM, athena streamlines process rather than creative output, turning fragmented information into a reliable, always-up-to-date single source of truth without forcing teams to change how they work.
By reducing manual data handling, surfacing inconsistencies early, and providing real-time collection visibility through smart alerts and task automation, athena helps brands cut overdevelopment, avoid costly errors, and bring products to market faster with greater confidence.
What’s next? The team is moving from insight to execution, developing autonomous, human-approved actions that allow athena to securely update files, sync systems, and execute changes across PLM, sourcing, and planning tools ahead of a broader rollout in 2026.
Find out more: heidi@athenastudio.io, athena studio
3. INHOUSE
INHOUSE helps fashion brands cut sampling costs and reduce production risk by embedding digital design and AI into practical, business-ready workflows without forcing a full-scale digital transformation.
Rather than selling software, the team designs tailored systems around each brand’s existing processes, focusing on decision-making, adoption, and clear use cases that improve margins and reduce costly mistakes.
By enabling earlier validation, fewer sample rounds, and faster approvals across design, product development, and marketing, INHOUSE helps teams launch with greater confidence, spend less on rework, and move toward more demand-led, lower-risk production models.
What’s next? The team is expanding its work into education and founder-focused programmes designed to help brands adopt AI and digital design with clarity, confidence, and commercial intent.
Find out more: hello@inhousecreativity.com, INHOUSE
4. yoona.ai
yoona.ai is an AI-powered product creation platform that transforms brand, market, and PLM data into actionable design direction, compressing weeks of research, ideation, and iteration into minutes.
Built on an agentic AI architecture, the platform combines generative design tools with data-driven validation to predict what will sell, merging ideation, refinement, and confidence scoring into a single, continuous workflow.
By enabling design, product development, and merchandising teams to generate, refine, and validate concepts early, yoona reduces sampling, shortens development timelines, and lowers the risk of low-performing products, delivering faster time-to-market with less waste and stronger commercial outcomes.
What’s next? The team is expanding its agentic AI ecosystem with deeper PLM and ERP integrations, autonomous design-to-brief workflows, and enhanced sell-through prediction, pushing toward a more automated, data-driven product creation pipeline.
Find out more: Anna Franziska Michel, yoona.ai
(B) Trend & Market Intelligence
Data platforms decoding consumer sentiment, market signals, and demand patterns to guide creative and commercial strategy.
1. Enstyle
Enstyle is an AI-powered trend and product intelligence platform that helps fashion teams understand what’s trending, why it matters, and what to make next.
Using autonomous AI agents that analyse millions of signals across runways, retail, culture, media, and social data, the platform replaces manual research with real-time, forward-looking insight grounded in consumer behaviour.
By enabling designers, merchandisers, and product teams to explore trends, benchmark competitors, and validate ideas in minutes, Enstyle reduces development risk, accelerates decision-making, and focuses investment on products with real demand potential.
What’s next? The team is expanding its agentic workflows with deeper competitive intelligence, automated product simulations, and new integrations to support demand estimation at the level of individual styles, silhouettes, and colourways.
For more information: founders@enstyle.ai, Enstyle
2. Trendalytics
Trendalytics is an AI-powered trend forecasting and market intelligence platform that helps fashion and beauty teams anticipate what will sell next.
By analysing billions of data points across social, search, and digital commerce, the platform delivers early, data-backed visibility into emerging and declining trends, alongside pricing, market, and competitive insights.
By enabling product, merchandising, marketing, and buying teams to focus on the trends that matter most, Trendalytics supports faster, smarter decisions that drive revenue growth, reduce waste, and improve commercial performance.
What’s next? The team continues to advance its AI-driven capabilities, with new features planned for 2026 to further strengthen predictive accuracy and decision-making confidence.
Find out more: Cate Khan, Trendalytics
(C) Marketing, Content & Visual Commerce
AI-driven tools reshaping how products are presented, experienced, and sold across digital channels.
1. Caimera
Caimera is an AI-powered imagery platform that enables fashion brands to generate studio-quality visuals using virtual models, without the cost, time, or environmental impact of traditional photoshoots.
Purpose-built for fashion, the platform helps brands maintain visual consistency across high-volume content production, from models and poses to lighting, colour grading, and overall brand identity.
By allowing teams to upload garments, customise shoots, and generate ready-to-use assets in minutes, Caimera accelerates content creation, improves campaign performance, and reduces costs and emissions across e-commerce, marketing, and advertising workflows.
What’s next? The team is expanding into dynamic video content, deeper e-commerce integrations, and enhanced collaboration tools to further embed AI-powered imagery into creative and commercial workflows.
Find out more: Kirti Poonia, Caimera
2. Glossi
Glossi is a real-time, browser-based product visualisation platform that transforms 3D models into high-quality stills, videos, and spins without specialised hardware or software.
Powered by cloud rendering and Unreal Engine, the platform enables teams to style lighting and camera, and export professional visuals, including 4K images and animations, up to ten times faster than traditional workflows.
By simplifying the creation of studio-level assets, Glossi helps design, marketing, and content teams bring products to life quickly across e-commerce, social, advertising, and launch campaigns while reducing reliance on external studios.
What’s next? Glossi continues to expand accessibility with collaborative workspaces, enhanced rendering controls, and broader format support to make high-impact 3D content easier to create and scale.
Find out more: glossi.io
3. Leapfrog AI
Leapfrog AI is an AI production partner helping global brands accelerate creative output without compromising quality.
As an official NVIDIA partner, the team deploys AVA, a purpose-built creative production hub that uses AI, stable diffusion, and automation to deliver premium fashion content at exceptional speed across marketing, merchandising, CRM, and e-commerce.
By reducing production timelines from days to minutes while maintaining high-end visual standards, Leapfrog AI enables brands to scale campaigns, content, and storytelling more efficiently and with greater creative control.
What’s next? The team continues to evolve AVA as a future-ready creative operating system, expanding automation, brand customisation, and enterprise use cases across the fashion value chain.
Find out more: leapfrogai.com
4. Touchtech
Touchtech is a digital selling platform that helps brands sell more effectively in wholesale through data-driven, personalised selling tools.
Through its DSR platform, sales teams can quickly create compelling presentations and tailored proposals, simplifying complex sales processes while strengthening customer relationships.
By combining technology with its DSR WAY™ of Selling training programme, Touchtech helps brands increase sales productivity, manage more customers with ease, and close more orders across modern wholesale environments.
What’s next? Touchtech continues to evolve its digital wholesale ecosystem, expanding platform capabilities and training methodologies to support more data-led, relationship-driven selling.
Find out more: https://touchtech.com/wholesale
(D) Fit, Sizing & Virtual Try-On
Startups tackling the fit crisis from design and production through to e-commerce and returns.
1. Bodidata
Bodidata is a fit-technology company that helps brands accurately match people of all shapes and sizes to the right garment, reducing returns and improving customer confidence both online and in-store.
At the core of the platform is the patented Kora® handheld scanner, which measures the body beneath everyday clothing and powers Bodidata’s Measure.Match.Manage® solution to deliver precise size recommendations and clear fit guidance.
By removing friction from fit measurement and unlocking actionable body-shape data, Bodidata helps retailers cut returns, improve loyalty, optimise inventory and omni-channel marketing, and drive margin growth while reducing ESG impact.
What’s next? The company is preparing for a national retail launch, scaling adoption through data-driven assortment, localisation, and personalised fit experiences.
Find out more: bruce@bodidata.com, Bodidata
2. Contour Lab
Contour Lab is a hyper-personalised retail platform that bridges online and in-store experiences, helping fashion retailers deliver expert, context-aware advice across every touchpoint.
Its Fashion Passport combines who a shopper is with what they want in the moment, enabling precise recommendations powered by zero- and first-party data rather than siloed systems.
By simplifying discovery and surfacing the most relevant products first, Contour Lab increases conversion and AOV, reduces returns, strengthens loyalty, and builds long-term customer intelligence for merchandising and planning.
What’s next? The team is expanding its shopper intent layer, launching an in-store dashboard for clienteling, and introducing conversational AI to activate the Fashion Passport across channels.
Find out more: Christina Hadinoto, Contour Lab
3. Couture Technologies
Couture Technologies delivers AI-powered fit and virtual try-on solutions that help apparel brands offer more confident, personalised online shopping experiences.
Built on patented technology and NSF-backed research, the platform focuses on accurate body measurement and garment-specific mapping to enable higher-precision size recommendations and virtual try-on than generic fit tools.
By reducing guesswork around fit and styling, Couture helps brands increase conversion, reduce returns, and deepen customer engagement across e-commerce and uniform purchasing journeys.
What’s next? The team is expanding access through a new Shopify app, advancing AI-driven customer insight dashboards, and exploring immersive in-store concepts with select partners.
Find out more: deanna@couturetechnologies.com, Couture Technologies
4. Fit Collective
Fit Collective is an AI copilot for fashion production teams that turns live customer, returns, and sales data into actionable fit and production intelligence. Operating at SKU, size, and attribute level, the platform helps teams identify fit-related risk early and prevent unprofitable products, inconsistent sizing, and avoidable waste before styles are scaled.
By flagging high-risk products and recommending corrective actions at the point decisions are made, Fit Collective helps brands reduce returns, protect margins, and accelerate more sustainable production workflows.
What’s next? The team is expanding its preventative, pre-production optimisation capabilities with deeper PLM integrations and increased automation.
Find out more: Phoebe Gormley, Fit Collective
5. SAIZ
SAIZ is a fit intelligence platform that gives fashion brands clear visibility into how their products actually fit real customers, and turns that insight into dynamic, brand-owned size guidance across every channel.
By unifying product data, garment construction, and real customer body measurements into a Product–Customer Data Platform, SAIZ replaces static size charts with a living fit intelligence engine.
By enabling teams to diagnose fit early and publish product-specific size guidance, SAIZ helps brands reduce returns, increase conversion, recover marketplace revenue, and build long-term fit expertise.
What’s next? The team is expanding its platform with KAIA, a conversational fit agent, deeper FitIQ diagnostics, and new marketplace integrations.
Find out more: Marita Sanchez de la Cerda, SAIZ
6. Weave
Weave is an early-stage virtual try-on and simulated fit platform that lets shoppers see how garments will look and fit using their own measurements and simulated reality.
Through a measurement-driven avatar experience, the platform makes fit visualisation more intuitive and personalised, helping shoppers preview fit and style before purchase.
By bridging body data with realistic garment simulation, Weave aims to boost confidence, reduce returns, and support more informed buying decisions across digital and omnichannel retail.
What’s next? As it progresses through pilot, the team is refining its simulation technology and expanding its product catalogue and SDK for brand integrations.
Find out more: weave.gl
Weave
(E) Planning, Forecasting & Supply Chain Optimization
Platforms and production models improving accuracy, efficiency, and decision-making from planning through fulfilment.
1. Hakio
Hakio is an end-to-end planning and buying platform built specifically for fashion brands, helping teams forecast demand, plan inventory, and buy more accurately in fast-moving markets.
Designed for fashion complexity, from size and style splits to volatile trends and long lead times, the platform replaces fragmented spreadsheets with a single, live planning environment powered by probabilistic AI. By giving planning and operations teams real-time visibility and control, Hakio helps brands reduce stockouts and overstock, free up working capital, cut waste, and grow revenue without inflating inventory.
What’s next? The team is expanding Hakio into a full-suite planning platform, sharpening algorithms and streamlining the day-to-day planner experience.
Find out more: Malte Bjerg Vittrup, Hakio
2. Intelo.ai
Intelo.ai is a collaborative intelligence platform that augments retail planning and merchandising teams with transparent, conversational AI agents.
Rather than black-box forecasting, the platform delivers explainable recommendations across forecasting, assortments, inventory, and financial planning, embedded directly into existing workflows.
By unifying data and supporting decisions from open-to-buy through in-season optimisation, Intelo.ai helps brands improve accuracy, reduce manual effort, and move faster with confidence.
What’s next? The team is scaling its collaborative intelligence capabilities and deepening integrations to support broader adoption across global retail operations.
Find out more: intelo.ai
3. KOO.BZ
KOO.BZ is an on-demand footwear manufacturing platform that uses 3D printing and automation to turn digital designs into finished products in days.
Through a fully digital, tool-less production model, the platform removes molds, complex assembly lines, and minimum order quantities, replacing traditional global supply chains with local, scalable manufacturing.
By enabling true make-to-order production, KOO.BZ helps brands cut inventory waste, accelerate time-to-market, reduce carbon impact, and launch footwear without logistical or financial barriers.
What’s next? Backed by recent funding, the team is scaling domestic production through a new California factory and expanding its printer fleet and engineering team.
Find out more: Kuba Graczyk, KOO.BZ
4. Profitmind
Profitmind is an AI-powered profit engine that helps retailers and brands uncover revenue, margin, and cashflow opportunities across pricing, inventory, assortments, and competition.
Combining machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI, the platform replaces slow, report-heavy analysis with weekly, goal-driven insights that prioritise what actions to take and what they are worth.
By giving leaders a 360-degree view of financial impact, Profitmind improves productivity, transparency, and decision confidence, delivering rapid gains in revenue and gross margin.
What’s next? The team continues to expand Profitmind’s agentic capabilities, deepening automation and decision support across core commercial levers.
Find out more: profitmind.com
Profitmind
5. Sizeo
Sizeo is an AI-driven size and pack optimisation platform that helps fashion and footwear brands place the right inventory, in the right sizes, in the right locations.
Built for fashion-specific complexity, the platform analyses true size-level demand, store-level needs, and operational constraints to replace blunt size curves with precise, localised strategies.
By automating size curve creation, pack planning, and inventory rebalancing, Sizeo helps planning teams reduce stockouts and markdowns, improve sell-through, and unlock more productive inventory.
What’s next? The team is expanding integrations across planning and allocation systems while deepening optimisation capabilities across all channels.
Find out more: sizeo.ai
(F) Customer Experience & Operational Automation
Solutions that connect customer interaction, engagement, and service with back-end efficiency.
1. DigitalGenius
DigitalGenius is an AI-powered customer service platform that enables online retailers and e-commerce brands to resolve customer queries automatically across every channel.
Using AI agents trained on retail-specific workflows, the platform supports customers throughout the purchase journey, delivers 24/7 service, and dramatically reduces response times without compromising quality.
By automating high-volume service interactions and augmenting human teams, DigitalGenius helps retailers improve customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and scale support in line with growth.
What’s next? The team is expanding its AI agent capabilities to enable deeper automation across customer journeys and tighter integration between service, commerce, and experience.
Find out more: https://www.digitalgenius.com
2. Fierce
Fierce is a B2B AI retail platform that turns interactive virtual try-on into shareable content, and shareable content into new demand.
By enabling shoppers to see themselves in products, try curated looks, and share them socially, the platform creates a commerce flywheel where every try-on becomes influence and every customer becomes a brand amplifier.
Combining AI-powered personalisation with social shopping mechanics, Fierce helps brands increase engagement, conversion, and average order value, while reducing returns and strengthening loyalty among style-conscious, Gen Z shoppers.
What’s next? The team is rolling out pilot programmes with select partners, publishing early case studies, and launching a closed beta of its B2C application ahead of broader scale and future fundraising.
Find out more: Cindy Ball, Fierce
Looking Ahead
The companies featured here are not building technology in isolation; they are responding to real frustrations, real constraints, and real human needs across design studios, planning teams, factories, and customer journeys.
Each reflects a different entry point into the same broader shift: toward systems that are more connected, more adaptive, and more respectful of the people who use them - whether that’s a designer trying to make better decisions earlier, a planner navigating uncertainty, or a shopper simply wanting something that fits.
As an industry, progress doesn’t come from watching innovation happen from the sidelines. It comes from engaging with it: asking questions, testing ideas, sharing context, and collaborating openly. If any of these platforms resonated, reach out, start a conversation, and explore what might be possible together.
Transformation doesn’t have to be abstract or overwhelming. As these startups show, it can be practical, incremental, and deeply human.
One workflow, one decision, one product at a time.
