Spanish AI platform Modelia closes 1.2 million dollar funding round to scale operations

Madrid – Modelia, the Spanish international business-to-business (B2B) platform specialising in AI-generated image creation and management for the fashion industry, has announced the successful completion of a 1.2 million dollar seed funding round. The capital will be used to drive and further scale its operations, with the US currently standing as its largest market.

According to details provided by the Spanish tech platform, Modelia was founded in 2024 by entrepreneurs Iván Rodríguez, its chief executive officer, and René Haas, its chief technology officer. The company has closed a 1.2 million dollar seed round. The funding was led by Spanish investment fund Next Tier, which specialises in artificial intelligence start-ups. Other existing investors also participated, including US-based Rapid Scale and Spanish investment firm Archipelago Next. A group of business angels from the fashion sector completed the round. Notably, Nacho Rivera, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of fashion brand Blue Banana alongside Juan Fernández-Estrada, participated in a personal capacity.

“We are living in one of those moments when an entire industry changes its language,” said Iván Rodríguez, co-founder and chief executive officer of Modelia. He noted that the emergence of artificial intelligence “has made the ability to generate an image accessible to everyone.” However, “producing fashion images on an industrial scale, true to the garment, true to the brand, edition after edition, collection after collection, is still a craft,” which is where Modelia comes in. He argued that while “small brands cannot operationalise AI on their own,” large ones “cannot do it without governance or workflows.” In response to these challenges, “Modelia is the infrastructure that closes that gap,” working towards the goal of “building the standard on which fashion imagery will be produced for the next 10 years.”

“What convinced us about Modelia was finding a team that combines top-tier technical execution with a deep understanding of the sector they serve,” added Patricia Pastor, founder and manager of the Spanish fund Next Tier, which led the investment round. “In applied AI, every advance in large models does not narrow the space for vertical start-ups; it expands it.” She explained that, in this context, “the defensive moat is no longer in the model, but in the application layer, in sector-specific workflows and in the user experience.” Against this backdrop, “Modelia understood before anyone else that fashion brands do not want to choose between AI models; they want production results,” Pastor added. Based on these demands, she stressed, “we see Iván and René, along with their team, as the natural candidates to lead this vertical globally.”

New funds to scale international operations

Modelia's current clients include multinationals such as Desigual and All We Wear Group (AWWG), the parent company of fashion brands Pepe Jeans, Façonnable and Hackett. The platform has also established collaborations with key industry events like Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid, where it was an official sponsor during the last edition in March. This highlights the company's distinctly international profile. Its global footprint is further emphasised by its revenue figures. The management team noted that the United States currently accounts for 44 percent of its total global revenue, with Europe as the second-largest market at 27 percent. The remaining revenue comes from operations in Asia and other smaller markets. Over the last six months, Modelia's platform has processed more than 300,000 SKUs for brands from 26 countries.

Building on these metrics and with the support of the funds raised, the company aims to accelerate and scale its operations. To achieve this, Modelia will “allocate the new funding to completing its enterprise platform layer, with new capabilities for consistency, style control, business rules, approval workflows” and enhancing “collaboration between teams and APIs to integrate into the e-commerce processes of large brands.” The platform aims to strengthen “its commercial expansion in Europe and the United States, its two main markets,” focusing on securing new “enterprise accounts in the fashion sector” with its AI image generation services. These services offer companies “garment fidelity, automatic application of brand guidelines, reusable models, governance, team collaboration and traceability.” This allows “a visual campaign that traditionally required weeks of production, model coordination, photography, editing and channel adaptation” to be “produced in hours, maintaining brand consistency across collections, geographies and commercial formats.”

“We are in a moment of acceleration for the ecosystem,” said Rodríguez. “Each new generation of generalist models reduces cost and latency, unlocking enterprise use cases that were not viable months ago due to ROI.” He continued, “In this context, value shifts to the orchestration and application layer,” where “deciding which model solves each task, integrating it into real production flows and ensuring brand fidelity at scale” is key, and “this is precisely where Modelia operates.” He acknowledged, “we are aware of where we are,” and that Modelia is “a young company in a category that is still being defined.” However, “every advance in large models makes us stronger, not weaker, because our job is not to compete with them but to turn them into reliable industrial production for a brand.” He concluded, “we have the right team, technology, clients and investors to aspire to lead this category globally.”

This article was translated to English using an AI tool.

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