Persi raises £660k pre-seed led by Haatch and ESM to fix broken fashion personalisation with human-centred AI
Summary
Persi, the fashion-tech start-up determined to repair what it calls the broken state of online personalisation, has closed a \xa3660,000 pre-seed fundraising round that was twice oversubscribed. Institutional B2B Investor Haatch and ESM Investments led the raise, while the final \xa350,000 was deliberately reserved for female angel investors.Parkes, a former brand and marketing strategist for leading fashion retailers, created Persi after concluding that the industrys data-driven recommendation engines were failing to meet consumers real-world needs. Existing systems, she argues, simply recycle a customers 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. 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.