Digital trend agency DressX raises $15 million in Sequence A funding

Will digital trend ever be in vogue? That is what trend tech agency DressX is betting on because it raises a $15 million Sequence A led by Berlin-based crypto enterprise capital agency Greenfield.

The spherical, which closed on the finish of February, additionally featured participation from Gradual Ventures, The Artemis Fund, Purple Dao and Warner Music.

Co-founders Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova declined to share the valuation in an interview with The Block however mentioned it was an uplift from its earlier $10 million valuation at seed.

Web3 beginnings

At its founding in 2020, DressX checked out methods to include on-chain trend however determined it was far too early.

“The idea of digital trend was already ground-breaking and never simple for everybody,” mentioned Modenova. “Including one other layer of problem and complexity right here would positively not assist it take off.”

Within the meantime, it centered on off-chain digital trend items that may be showcased on platforms like Roblox and Instagram. Within the course of, it racked up over 250,000 customers on its app, the place customers can entry a digital closet of purchased objects.

As the recognition of digital trend picked up, DressX noticed an viewers emerge that understood web3 and commenced to dive deeper into NFTs, launching its market in March final yr and forging a partnership with alternate Crypto.com — which included an NFT drop of the Tremendous Bowl outfits designed by trend label Dundas for singer Mary J. Blige.

NFTs bought on its market might be worn digitally in augmented actuality through the DressX app or used as skins in metaverse video games Prepared Participant Me or Decentraland.

Regardless of the deal with web3, the founders admit that their off-chain objects are primarily the agency’s bread and butter, with its NFT trend primarily locked towards those that know their approach round a seed phrase and a MetaMask pockets.

Furthermore, digital trend — not to mention NFT trend — continues to be very nascent. The trade’s dimension was valued at round $342 million final yr, a small reduce of the couture pie in comparison with the trillions that its bodily counterpart is price.

The funding might be used partly to enhance the interoperability of its digital trend property and enhance the efficiency of its app and NFT market.

Return of the early stage?

Final month, early phases offers corresponding to FashionX’s Sequence A confirmed an uptick since a pointy decline final October. The variety of early-stage offers doubled from final month’s eight to fifteen in February, per The Block Analysis. Nonetheless, when it comes to greenback quantity, the typical dimension of such offers declined.

“One contributor to the rise in early-stage rounds could also be that financing phrases have come down, leading to traders being extra prepared to put money into firms at this stage,” defined The Block’s Offers analysis director John Dantoni. “Six of the fifteen raises in our dataset had a valuation that averaged $103.5 million, and the median valuation equated to $92.5 million.”