Persi, the fashion-tech start-up determined to repair what it calls the “broken” state of online personalisation, has closed a £660,000 pre-seed fundraising round that was twice oversubscribed. Institutional B2B Investor Haatch and ESM Investments led the raise, while the final £50,000 was deliberately reserved for female angel investors.
Parkes, a former brand and marketing strategist for leading fashion retailers, created Persi after concluding that the industry’s data-driven recommendation engines were failing to meet consumer’s real-world needs. Existing systems, she argues, simply recycle a customer’s past clicks and purchases, or else offer items favoured by “people like them,” producing noise rather than relevance. Persi reverses that logic: its AI first learns the context of each individual - what is already hanging in their wardrobe, how they define their personal style, even the events looming in their calendar, before suggesting products that genuinely complement those realities.
The stakes for retailers are high. Acquisition costs continue to climb, conversion rates keep slipping and, in the United Kingdom last year, online fashion returns reached 50%. Because traditional recommendation software is trapped inside a single merchant’s transactional silo, it cannot grasp the nuances of style or the reasons someone might, or might not, buy a garment. The result is irrelevant recommendations, frustrated shoppers and eroding unit economics.
Persi’s answer is a more sustainable discovery engine that plugs effortlessly into any e-commerce site, analyses consumer uploads and multiple data points, and returns suggestions that resonate with true personal taste.
Early evidence suggests the model works. In a consumer MVP with forty-two paying users and a B2B pilot on the rental platform Hirestreet, Persi delivered 90% style-match accuracy, 40% click-through on recommended items and 100% customer satisfaction.
The fresh capital allows Persi to expand its team - chief product and technology officer Matthew Deakins now joins Parkes and chair Sue Cherrie, launch its plug-and-play SaaS solution for fashion retailers, deepen its AI capabilities through a research partnership with the University of Stirling and accelerate go-to-market initiatives and brand partnerships.
