Artiso raises over €3M pre-seed to build fashion’s operating system
Three former Mango executives rebuilt the AI tools they once used inside a Barcelona fashion group and are now selling them to the industry. Criteria Venture Tech led the pre-seed at over €3 million.
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Founded 2025 · Barcelona, Spain
Artiso, a Barcelona company founded by three former Mango executives, has raised more than €3 million in pre-seed funding led by Criteria Venture Tech to build an AI operating system for fashion teams.
Criteria Venture Tech leads, with two angels from inside the industry
The round was announced on October 28, 2026. Criteria Venture Tech, the technology investment arm of CriteriaCaixa, led, and Swanlaab Venture Factory and Bynd Venture Capital came in alongside. Two angels signed from inside the business the company sells to: David Tomás, co-founder of Cyberclick, and Nicolaj Reffstrup, founder and former chief executive of the Danish brand Ganni, through his vehicle Look Up Ventures (Dealroom and startup.eu, October 28, 2026).
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The money goes to platform development and hiring. Artiso works with mid-sized brands and large fashion groups across Europe, North America and Asia, and names the United States as a key market. No customer is named publicly.
Three Mango insiders and the tool they could not buy
Sarah Iglesias Hiller is chief executive, Lucas Pastur chief product officer and Matthias Brenninkmeijer chief technology officer. The three worked together in the innovation unit at Mango, the Barcelona group, where they tested AI inside design workflows before leaving to build their own. Artiso launched in July 2025 (FashionUnited, July 8, 2025). “So we built the operating system we had always needed,” Iglesias told Dealroom.
The product sits on top of the software a fashion team already runs, including product lifecycle management systems and design tools, and uses agentic AI to connect those workflows and hold the knowledge from past collections and campaigns in one place. Moodboards, sketches, prints, virtual models, tech packs and campaign visuals live in the same environment. Artiso reports up to 70% less product development time, concept-to-campaign cycles five times faster and up to 90% lower cost on commercial visual assets. Those figures are the company’s own and have not been independently audited.
A tooling market compounding at 39.8% inside a flat industry
The AI in fashion market was worth $1.75 billion in 2025 and $2.47 billion in 2026, and is forecast to reach $9.45 billion by 2030, a 39.8% compound annual growth rate from 2026 (The Business Research Company, AI in Fashion Market Report 2026, September 2026). The industry it sells into moves at a different speed: McKinsey and The Business of Fashion expect low single-digit growth for global fashion in 2026, with more than 35% of fashion and luxury executives already using generative AI in customer service, image creation, copywriting and product discovery (The State of Fashion 2026, November 17, 2025).
That gap is the commercial case in one line. The clothes business is flat, and the software that makes the clothes business cheaper to run is compounding at nearly 40% a year.
Our own European fundraising data puts the check in scale. Veesual, the Paris company doing AI imagery for fashion e-commerce, raised €6.7 million at seed in April 2024 led by AVP. Rodinia Generation raised €4 million at seed in October 2026 led by Vitamin°C. More than €3 million is a large pre-seed against those two, and it is still a pre-seed: the founders are funded on the Mango years, with no public revenue behind the round.
What the Lalaland exit says about point tools in fashion
Here is the pattern worth naming. Lalaland.ai, the Amsterdam company generating AI fashion models, raised €2.1 million in 2022 and was acquired in 2025 by Browzwear, which sells 3D design and PLM software. A point tool for fashion imagery ended up inside the system of record, because the workflow was already there. Artiso starts from the other end and sells the connecting layer from day one, which is a harder first sale and a much harder thing for an incumbent to absorb later.
So why does Barcelona get to try this? I keep hearing that fashion is slow to buy software, and the record backs it up. The good news is that Europe has the customers in the building. Mango, Inditex, Desigual and Ganni are the kind of accounts this product needs, a short train ride from the founders’ old desks, and one of them has already put a founder’s own money into the round. We spend a lot of time asking why European software companies win their first big logo in America. Here is one that gets to learn on home accounts.
What we are watching now is whether the connecting layer holds its ground. Spanish retail software has been raising at pre-seed all autumn, and the fashion and beauty tech companies on our books skew toward single jobs, imagery above all. Artiso has to prove that connecting the tools is worth more to a brand than any one of them.
Fashion has had AI pilots for three years. What it has not had is anyone owning the handoffs between them. Watch whether Artiso’s first named customer is a European group or an American one, because that single fact will tell us more about where this market settles than the size of a pre-seed. Let’s keep score.
