The Swedish developer of an online platform which aims to connect fashion brands with sustainable material suppliers has attracted €25m backing from investors in its first major funding round, it announced this morning.
Material Exchange has attracted growing interest from leading fashion brands and retailers – including Levis, Gap, H&M and Target – for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, which seeks to enable footwear and apparel brands to create, develop and source materials in a more sustainable way.
The Series A funding round investment announced today, which was led by Molten Ventures, is initially aimed at stepping up recruitment and scaling the business, according to Material Exchange chief executive and founder Darren Glenister.
“With this round, we’re able to accelerate our mission of leading the global revolution to sustainable, transparent apparel and footwear material sourcing by aggregating fragmented data into one digital solution,” he said. “We believe the shift will ultimately have the greatest impact for brands and suppliers as well as end-consumers.”
Suppliers can subscribe to the platform and then upload, manage, and showcase their materials and share all relevant material data in predefined data models, according to Material Exchange. Fashion brands that subscribe, meanwhile, are then able to connect with these suppliers while managing all their materials and workflows across teams in real-time.
The Material Exchange platform also features a ‘Brand Material Management System’ for organising materials and collaborating with stakeholders as well as 3D scanning for creating accurate visuals, it said.
Other investors in the €25m funding round include previous seed investors in the firm such as Partech, Inventure, Norrsken, Lyra, and Day One Capital.
Nicola McClafferty, partner at Molten Ventures hailed the “significant and largely untapped opportunity in digitising the highly complex and offline fashion supply chain”, which he said Material Exchange offered.
“The need for transparency and sustainability as well as ongoing supply chain disruptions are proving to be powerful forces for accelerating the structural trend of digitisation of sourcing workflows for both brands and suppliers in the apparel industry,” he said. “We have been impressed not only by the early successes with leading brands and suppliers, but also by the team’s approach to building and owning this category. Such an understanding of the intricacies and complexities of the fashion supply chain can only come from a team of industry veterans, and having gotten to know Darren and the team, we have developed real conviction that this is an opportunity, approach, and team to back.”
