Led by Criteria Venture Tech, with Swanlaab, Bynd Venture Capital, David Tomás and GANNI founder Nicolaj Reffstrup, the pre-seed round will help ARTISO scale to meet growing demand from fashion brands worldwide.

Barcelona, 28 October 2026. ARTISO, the AI operating system built for fashion teams, has raised more than €3 million in a fully equity pre-seed round led by Criteria Venture Tech, fuelling the rapid growth it has built since emerging from stealth. Swanlaab Venture Factory and Bynd Venture Capital joined the round, alongside business angels David Tomás, co-founder of Cyberclick, and Nicolaj Reffstrup, founder and former CEO of GANNI, who invests through Look Up Ventures and brings to ARTISO the experience of building one of the world’s most influential contemporary fashion brands.

Fashion is the world’s largest creative industry. No other sector designs as many products, and few reinvent them as often, season after season. That combination of volume and constant change makes fashion one of the industries where AI can create the most value. ARTISO’s vision is to redefine how fashion brands create, end to end. Today that work is spread across disconnected tools: product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, design software, image generators, shared drives, spreadsheets and email. Every season, part of what a brand has learned is lost along the way: which shapes sold, which colours worked, what was designed two seasons ago. ARTISO is building the AI-native operating system that brings that work and that knowledge together, using agentic AI to transform the process from the first idea to the final campaign.

Just over a year after emerging from stealth in July 2025, ARTISO already works with mid-sized to enterprise brands with strong identities, from fast-growing players in full transformation to established category leaders and luxury houses, as well as the retailers and manufacturers behind them. Its customers span Europe, North America and Asia, with the US as a key market. The new funding will help ARTISO bring more of them on board.

The round, an unusually large pre-seed for fashion tech, backs a mixed founding team led by co-founder and CEO Sarah Iglesias Hiller, a former Mango executive. “I spent years leading creative teams that had to orchestrate every step of a collection across tools that never spoke to each other,” says Iglesias Hiller. “So we built the operating system we always needed: one that knows each brand’s archive, its customers and its taste, and that is already running inside fashion companies today. AI is changing how every collection is imagined, made and shown, and with ARTISO, creativity, not complexity, defines fashion’s next era.”

ARTISO is designed for creatives: visual, intuitive and built around the way fashion teams actually work. Its agentic AI takes collections from inspiration and moodboards to design and flat sketches, product development and pre-production such as tech packs, virtual models, on-model imagery, packshots and campaign content. Underneath sits a brand memory and ontology that captures each brand’s archive, bestsellers, seasonal direction and visual codes, so every output is hyper-personalised to the brand’s DNA. A complete tech pack takes around four minutes instead of two to six hours. Because ARTISO connects the whole process end to end, creative direction, design, pattern making, product development, visual merchandising and marketing all work in the same operating system.

ARTISO puts creative teams at the centre and amplifies what they can do: they explore more ideas, test them earlier and raise the quality of every decision, before a single sample is made.

The new capital will accelerate the development of ARTISO’s operating system, expand the team and support its customers’ enterprise rollouts. To get there, ARTISO is hiring across fashion and technology, joining a team that already spans garment technology, pattern making, design, art direction, motion and data science.

Lucas Pastur Romay, co-founder and CPO: “We designed ARTISO for the people who make fashion: creative directors, designers, pattern makers, merchandisers. It is intuitive, it remembers each brand and adapts to how every team works, and it connects every step, from the first moodboard to the tech pack and the campaign, in one operating system.”

Matthias Brenninkmeijer, co-founder and CTO: “Fashion imagery is where AI first proved its value, and ARTISO takes it further: every image, sketch and tech pack is created with an understanding of the brand behind it. Our agents combine state-of-the-art generation with each brand’s own knowledge, while people stay in control of every decision. That is what turns AI from a tool into a new way of working.”

Sarah Iglesias Hiller, co-founder and CEO: “Brands no longer want to experiment with AI; they want it working across their teams. As images become abundant, what makes a brand different is its taste, and that taste lives in its archive, its bestsellers and the decisions of its people. ARTISO turns that into the operating system fashion has been missing. What we see every week, from global leaders to brands in full transformation, tells us the moment is now.”

Roma Jelinskaite, Managing Director at Criteria Venture Tech: “At Criteria Venture Tech we look for teams with the ambition to build global category leaders from Europe. ARTISO has a rare combination: founders who have lived the problem first-hand, a product customers already use end to end, and clear demand on both sides of the Atlantic. We are proud to lead this round and to support them for the long term.”

Nicolaj Reffstrup, founder and former CEO of GANNI: “Taste is what makes a brand distinctive. AI can’t replace it, but it can give talented creative teams extraordinary leverage. ARTISO is building the infrastructure for that, from inside fashion.”

In the press

Cinco Días, in Spanish
El Español, in Spanish
Forbes España, in Spanish
Modaes, in Spanish
FashionUnited
EU-Startups

About ARTISO

ARTISO is the AI operating system for fashion, connecting inspiration, design, product development, pre-production such as tech packs, styling and campaign imagery on top of each brand’s own memory. Founded in Barcelona in 2025 by Sarah Iglesias Hiller (CEO), Lucas Pastur Romay (CPO) and Matthias Brenninkmeijer (CTO), former Mango executives who have worked together since 2022, ARTISO is backed by Criteria Venture Tech, Swanlaab, Bynd Venture Capital and leading fashion and technology angels. www.artiso.ai

About Criteria Venture Tech

Criteria Venture Tech is a European venture capital fund backing the next generation of technology leaders. Investing at the pre-seed and seed stages, the firm partners with ambitious entrepreneurs building transformative businesses across AI, cybersecurity, enterprise software and deeptech. As one of Criteria Capital Risc’s investment funds, Criteria Venture Tech combines long-term capital, deep technological expertise and a powerful global network to help ambitious startups scale into category-defining companies.

About Swanlaab Venture Factory

Swanlaab is a venture capital firm that backs B2B software and deep-tech startups with international ambition and supports them with a hands-on company-building approach.

About Bynd Venture Capital

Bynd is an Iberian early-stage venture capital firm headquartered in Lisbon that invests in pre-seed and seed technology startups in Portugal and Spain.

Media contacts

press@artiso.ai