AI-powered startup Mad Street Den raises Series A funding to strengthen global presence

CHENNAI: Not long before, in March 2016, Voice and Data featured an upcoming AI-powered startup called Mad Street Den. The feature highlighted how this company is surprisingly growing at a really fast pace using Artificial Intelligence that eases a customer’s search and decision-making easier with its Vue.ai in the fashion industry. Today, this Chennai-based company, Mad Street Den, led by entrepreneur couple Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran, has raised funds through a Series A from Sequoia India and their current investors, Exfinity Ventures & growX Ventures. The company also counts a few Valley-based folks from Google and investors like Shruti Gandhi, Managing Partner, Array Ventures among their investors in this round.

Founded in 2013, Mad Street Den has grown across the US, UK and India. A collective mix of neuroscientists, data scientists, fashion stylists, computer vision experts, marketers and designers. With a mission of Designing AI for humans by humans, the team focus is to bring its Deep Tech to billions across the globe.

Mad Street Den will use the Series A funds to spearhead into the global market with a focus on the high street and luxury fashion sector. The future is now as they reimagine retail, while building out its core Computer Vision platform.

“The business of retail is an increasingly tense market that needs fresh thought and approach,” said Ashwini Asokan, CEO, Mad Street Den. “Artificial intelligence has the potential to be the single view into the future of retail. The possibilities are endless when you bring the power of Image & Video intelligence together with Data and that’s what we do at Mad Street Den.”

The company’s first vertical, Vue.ai, already serves retailers across the globe, with artificial intelligence to provide the ultimate personal stylist showing consumers what they want, when they want it in a holistic customer journey with personal relevance for them across an entire app, site or store in multiple formats.

Asokan elaborated and said, “This funding will enable the company to innovate in 3 key areas: powering a Visual Intelligence based personalization platform to understand style preferences, directly adding value to the fashion industry’s ability to grow customer relationships in the digital world; crafting unique experiences for fashion retailers by bringing physical and digital experiences together. From omni channel, to omni brand, empowering customers to find what they want, even when they don’t speak fashion jargon. Essentially, a global fashion translator; and building insights to accurately measure and predict customer behavior needs across the entire consumer journey, automate visual merchandising, inventory management and reduce customer returns.”

“The company is also a growing tech powerhouse, with groundbreaking technology and applying it at scale. The core of everything we do is built around neuromorphic principles. The real power of AI will be unlocked when it learns organically, with minimal data. Our image tagging application is an example of how we’ve bootstrapped a learning system with very minimal data or training sets, focusing on its evolution through customer interaction,” said Anand Chandrasekaran, a pro-neuroscientist, Founder and CTO at Mad Street Den.

Gautam Mago, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors said, “Mad Street Den is a pioneer in what we think of as the next wave of AI startups, which will be capable of making versatile intelligence possible with small data sets, and yield magical results. Significant learning, and not just label training is at the heart of these startups, who are only now beginning to emerge. We are delighted to partner with the founders on their journey.”

Shailesh Ghorpade, GM, Exfinity Ventures commented, “Mad Street Den is an AI company that is a technology leader in personalization for online and offline fashion and retail with several global marquess clients. We are delighted to add to our invest in their series A and look forward to their continuing to develop market leadership across AI technologies.”