Digital Fashion House DressX Raises $15 Million to Boost Virtual Wearables

Digital fashion house DressX has raised $15 million to continue expanding its wearable virtual and augmented reality offerings, the company announced Tuesday.

The Series A funding round, led by European crypto investment firm Greenfield Capital, also featured participation from Slow Ventures, Warner Music, The Artemis Fund, and DAO messagesdigital fashion collective.

Despite launching less than three years ago, DressX counts itself among the oldest and most established players in the fast-growing, metaverse-oriented digital wearables economy. DressX designs virtual fashion items to be worn by virtual avatars both on-chain, as an NFT, and off-chain, as skins in a non-blockchain based game ecosystem. The company also creates augmented reality (AR) clothing that real-life users can wear as filters on social media platforms.

DressX, since its inception in August 2020, straddles both sides of the Web3 discourse, prioritizing mass adoption over strict adherence to decentralization principles.

The company ruffled some feathers among today’s tightly knit digital fashion ecosystem it partnered with tech giant Meta last July to bring digital apparel to the company’s off-chain Horizon World metaverse. Detractors argue that the company is allied with its greatest adversary—and obstacle—an openness, decentralized metaverse. DressX founder tells Decryption at a time when they are trying to bring digital fashion to as large an audience as possible.

The fiery blockchain-powered metaverse enthusiasm has been undeniably cooled in front of technology hurdles and exhausting bear markets, so the DressX bet might be a smart one. Just yesterday Meta announced plans to discontinue NFT support on its platform, discontinuing Web3-enabled initiatives launched less than a year ago; Horizon World DressX’s offering, which does not live on the blockchain, was not affected by the announcement.

“We are building content for the here and now,” said DressX co-founder Daria Shapovalova Decryption. “You can wear DressX on social media. Is it part of the metaverse? Is that not part of the metaverse?” Shapovalova seemed indifferent to the difference. “We started DressX even before metaverse was a word people were using.”

The same goes for NFTs.

“People are starting to move away from even using the word NFT,” another DressX co-founder, Natalia Modenova, told Decryption. “NFTs [adoption] never been a destination for us. It’s just one way to distribute digital fashion.”

DressX will continue to offer blockchain-compatible digital clothing; they may stop calling the item NFT. And many of the company’s top sellers have nothing to do with crypto.

DressX’s main use case, by far, is social media: users wear digital AR dresses in Instagram photos or virtual hats in front-facing videos. Such apps don’t require blockchain compatibility, and considering yesterday’s Meta announcement, they sometimes get in the way.

“We use a lot of different technologies in our stack, and blockchain is one of them,” said Modenova. “Different trends are changing our ideas about digital fashion, and we are leveraging different technologies to bring that vision to life.”

Another similar technology is artificial intelligence. Next month, DressX plans to launch a beta version of a program that, assisted by AI, will allow users to quickly insert digital clothing into large batches of photos or videos in a way that significantly speeds up the process of adapting AR fashion pieces to real-world physical environments. different.

DressX founders say their $15 million raise will allow the company to start scaling, especially on the technical side.

In an industry so closely linked to the ever-turbulent pulse of the crypto market, DressX may have found a way forward to protect itself not only from the connotations that currently tarnish perceptions of NFTs and the metaverse, but also from market forces.

in December, Warner Music, one of the investors in Tuesday’s funding round, tapped DressX to begin designing digital apparel for the label’s artists and fans of the artist. That partnership, another with a major Web2 brand, does not feature any visible characteristics of the token.