Viavia Corp., a video-first e-commerce platform based in West Hollywood, announced last week an $8 million seed round to launch a fashion retail destination geared toward Gen-Z shoppers. The funding round was co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Basis Set Ventures, with participation from Exor Seeds, Backend Ventures, and Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. The funding follows a $1.15 million pre-seed round.
Viavia, which was founded in 2021, seeks to modernize the fashion e-commerce experience by marrying creator-driven live and short-form video content with end-to-end, AI-powered tech infrastructure for the fashion supply chain.
“Fashion retail is undergoing a radical transformation,” Sixuan Li, Viavia’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement. “Export-focused Asian supply chains have warped the traditional timeline from an emerging trend concept to wearable apparel. To make sense of this speed and production volume, Gen-Z consumers expect brands to communicate with them through authentic, creator-led, and video-first content.”
The fashion company believes that existing e-commerce platforms are ill-equipped to respond to this shift in consumer behavior and plans to change this paradigm by representing creators and influencers through an in-house talent team and indexing heavily on video and live streaming to bring brand stories to life.
According to the company, Viavia’s technology solution increases order flow to local manufacturers, lowering costs for brands and shortening production lead times.
Andrea Pasinetti, Viavia co-founder and head of engineering, said in a release that the company is starting an AI-powered “product lifecycle management” tool that will connect designers and brands to manufacturers in Italy and beyond.
Viavia believes this infrastructure will scale effectively to other manufacturing hubs across Europe and comes as record amounts of capital flow to the global e-commerce supply chain and logistics companies, with the latter projected to grow to $3 trillion in 2028.
“Viavia has a big, audacious vision to modernize luxury e-commerce for a new generation of consumers, rethinking the entire value proposition from supply chain to sales,” said Xuezhao Lan, founder and managing partner of Basis Set Ventures, in a statement.
