Odd Concepts Raises USD10M Accumulated Investments; Emerges as a Leading AI-based Fashion Company in APAC

Despite the impact in start-up investment scene due to the COVID-19 crisis, Odd Concepts Inc., an AI-based fashion tech company, succeeded in attracting continuous investments.

The latest funding increased the company’s accumulated investments to about USD10M (KRW 10 billion), an amount enough for Korea’s leading AI-powered fashion company to expand its growth into Asia-Pacific markets.

Odd Concepts announced on March 30 that it raised USD6M (KRW 6 billion) in Series B funding for its outstanding PXL service and business.

Participants in the funding were KB Securities, an affiliate of an existing investor; HB Investment; Kiwoom Investment-Shinhan Capital; Korea Development Bank; and SBI Investment Korea.

Only a handful number of Korean AI start-ups drew around USD10M (KRW 10 billion) in accumulated investments. Odd Concepts is the only AI start-up to do so in commerce. It deserves to be recognized as the front-runner in the field.

It commercialized PXL, its fashion styling service using its own machine learning technologies to recognize, analyze and search images. The service is provided to e-commerce fashion businesses.

PXL is a service that recommends personalized fashion products based on analyzing products that interest consumers. The service is used by about 100 e-commerce companies in Korea and other APAC countries including Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, and Thailand. The number of monthly unique users of the PXL service tops 9 million.

Odd Concepts has learned about fashion trends analyzing billions of data on consumers, products and the way users coordinate fashion that it has gathered by providing PXL as a commercial service for three years. Considering the importance of data in AI industries, Odd Concepts is spearheading the depth of its technology over the incumbents.

“We decided to invest in Odd Concepts because company’s own technology clearly verifies the class of excellence in the popular field of fashion commerce,” Jeong Seong-hoon, an assistant manager of KB Securities, said, “I expect Odd Concept’s proprietary machine learning technologies would be applied to other industries extensively.”

Earlier this year, Odd Concepts was ready to advance into the APAC markets by taking over SEACRUX, a Singaporean startup expanding its APAC businesses on contextual targeting Ad system, which was leveraging applied machine learning.

“The markets have verified the needs and excellence of our service,” Odd Concepts CEO Kim Jeong-tae said, “Now is the time to increase our business in the APAC markets.”

In 2012 when Odd Concepts was established, artificial intelligence technologies were unfamiliar, but Odd Concepts has focused on AI vision technologies since its establishment. It holds more than 60 patents at home and abroad, including registered ones and filings. It placed first in about 10 domestic and foreign benchmark tests, emerging as a deep tech company.

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