Modelia Raises $1.2M for AI Fashion Imagery

Jan de Vries · 2026-06-02

Madrid-based Modelia, an AI platform for generating and managing fashion visuals, has secured $1.2 million in Seed funding. The round was led by Next Tier, a Spanish fund focused exclusively on AI startups, with participation from returning investors Rapid Scale (United States) and Archipelago Next (Spain). The company plans to use the capital to advance its technology and expand across Europe and the United States. ### Why This Matters for Fashion Brands Fashion imagery is a beast. Traditionally, producing a single campaign can take weeks of coordinating models, photographers, and editors, then adapting everything for different channels. Modelia claims it can now do this in hours while keeping brand consistency across collections, geographies, and formats. That's a game-changer for brands juggling hundreds of SKUs. "We are living in one of those moments when an entire industry is changing its language," says Iván Rodríguez, CEO and co-founder. "Artificial intelligence has made image generation accessible to anyone, but producing fashion imagery at an industrial scale—true to the garment, true to the brand, issue after issue—remains a craft."  ### What Sets Modelia Apart The funding landscape in 2025 is shifting toward applied AI tools for e-commerce, creative production, and marketing operations. Modelia sits squarely in that sweet spot. Its closest competitors include Voxelo's AI and 3D product-content tooling, Cernel's AI e-commerce infrastructure, and Dragonfly AI's creative-testing platform. But Modelia's focus is narrower: it's built specifically for fashion workflows. Rodriguez explains: "Small brands cannot operationalize AI on their own, and large ones cannot do so without governance or workflows. Modelia is the infrastructure that bridges that gap. Our goal is to build the standard upon which fashion imagery will be produced for the next ten years." ### Real Results and Growth Founded in 2024 by Rodriguez (a third-time serial entrepreneur and Endeavor member since 2015) and René Haas (CTO with a PhD in generative AI and computer vision), Modelia has already shown impressive traction. The platform has processed over 300,000 SKUs in the last six months and works with brands from 26 countries. Monthly sales growth has been a steady 15%. - **Key clients**: Desigual, AWWG, and Fútbol Emotion use Modelia to generate and adapt product visuals across commercial channels. - **Industry presence**: It was an official partner of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid in March 2025 and will return in September for the event's 40th anniversary. ### The Bigger Picture Patricia Pastor, founder and General Partner at Next Tier, sums up the investment thesis: "What convinced us about Modelia was finding a team that combines top-tier technical execution with a deep understanding of the sector they serve. In applied AI, every advance in large models doesn't narrow the space for vertical startups—it expands it. The competitive moat is no longer in the model; it's in the application layer, in industry-specific workflows, and in the user experience." Modelia's round is smaller than some broader AI marketing raises, but it follows a clear pattern: investors are backing vertical AI systems that connect generation, workflow control, and commercial deployment—not just standalone content creation tools. For fashion brands looking to cut production times and scale visual assets, Modelia is worth watching closely.