The Global VC

Rosetta.ai Wants to Give Fashion Retailers a Boost with AI-Enabled E-Commerce Tools

As fashion e-commerce grows, it is important for brands to lean into online sales and create engaging shopping experiences.

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The Rosetta.ai team. Picture courtesy of Rosetta.ai

Fashion e-commerce is a big deal: with a global market value of $759.5 billion in 2021, apparel, accessories and footwear are the number one e-commerce sector worldwide. That number is only expected to grow in coming years, making it more important than ever for fashion brands and retailers of all sizes to lean into online channels. 

To do so effectively, they need tools that help create engaging and unique shopping experiences that attract customers and drive sales. That’s where we believe Rosetta.ai is making an impact with its AI-enabled e-commerce solutions for fashion retail. The startup helps merchants identify shopper preferences and deliver personalized recommendations in real-time, while reaching customers across multiple digital channels. 

The Nuts & Bolts

Problem: As the fashion industry grapples with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, brands and retailers can no longer avoid embracing digital sales channels. But online retail comes with its own challenges too: notably, the average online conversion rate for the fashion clothing and accessories industry is less than 3%

Although there are several e-commerce recommendation and personalization tools available to help retailers navigate online sales, no single player has managed yet to dominate the market and most solutions focus on traditional traffic-based analysis. Many existing recommendation engines today focus on multiple product categories, leading to generalized e-commerce tools that don’t address the specific needs of fashion retailers. 

We believe there’s room for new innovations here, especially at a time when data privacy concerns are rising and making third-party cookies less useful. We see an opportunity for AI and machine learning solutions to help fill that gap and give fashion retailers the solutions they need to understand customer preferences and guide shoppers to relevant products.

Solution: Rosetta.ai’s AI-enabled e-commerce tools are designed to distinguish consumer preferences, and personalize online shops to serve each visitor and provide merchants with e-commerce marketing tools to reach customers across multiple channels and drive traffic back to their websites. The goal is to help fashion retailers boost sales, improve conversion rates and build customer loyalty. 

This isn’t a traditional recommendation solution relying on traffic-based analysis. Rosetta.ai uses deep learning computer vision to deliver attribute-based analysis on shopper preferences, behaviors and inventory forecasting. Its technology can visually recognize hundreds of attributes from a merchant’s product images, which allows Rosetta.ai to analyze and create individual profiles for each shopper and recommend the most relevant products. That also helps it personalize marketing content, which is then delivered to shoppers through websites, emails, chat apps and more. 

Rosetta.ai has integrated its solution with major e-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, 91App, Shopline, Waca, Cyberbiz, and Easystore. That allows it to reach and support a sizable number of merchants all over the world. 

Getting to know Rosetta.ai

​​The company’s roots trace to 2016, when its three founders met at a hackathon in Taiwan and built an AI solution for e-commerce. They kept collaborating and joined several accelerator programs, which led them to the right product-market fit. CEO Daniel Huang brings experience in back-end and data engineering, as well as product management from his time working at Taiwanese e-commerce startup iFit. COO Alice Li has experience in interior design and product design, while CTO Steeve Huang recently earned a Master’s in computer science from USC, and is working on his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he’s a member of the BLENDER Lab

Why now?

We believe Rosetta.ai has an opportunity to become a key e-commerce solution for fashion merchants globally as online sales grow and fashion retailers of all sizes look for technologies that provide an edge. Already, there appears to be demand for AI-enabled solutions like Rosetta.ai’s, with retailers in general projected to spend $7.3 billion on such technologies by next year, up from $2 billion in 2018. 

Consumers are more willing to try new brands—including those recommended on popular sites—and shoppers are expected to demand more personalization in the future when it comes to fashion e-commerce. 

The future of Rosetta.ai

Rosetta.ai already works with over 1,000 merchant customers across major e-commerce platforms and has emerged as a key fashion personalization solution in Taiwan, with organic growth coming from Southeast Asia and the U.S. 

The startup is now testing a new cross-channel advertising solution, which should create additional growth opportunities. We look forward to helping Rosetta.ai expand globally and empower merchants of all sizes.

You can learn more about Rosetta.ai at: https://www.rosetta.ai/ 

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Shawn Chu

Shawn Chu

Principal

Shawn Chu is a Principal at 500 Global