Modelia, a Madrid-based platform for generating and managing visual assets using AI for the fashion industry, has closed a €1.03 million ($1.2 million) Seed round to develop its technology and expand across Europe and the U.S.
The round was led by Next Tier, a Spanish fund specialising exclusively in AI startups, and includes participation from Rapid Scale (United States) and Archipelago Next (Spain), existing investors who are participating again in this round.
“We are living in one of those moments when an entire industry is changing its language. Artificial intelligence has made the ability to generate an image accessible to anyone, but producing fashion imagery at an industrial scale – true to the garment, true to the brand, issue after issue, collection after collection – remains a craft,” says Iván Rodríguez, CEO and co-founder of Modelia.
“Small brands cannot operationalise AI on their own, and large ones cannot do so without governance or workflows. Modelia is the infrastructure that bridges that gap. Our goal is to build the standard upon which fashion imagery will be produced for the next ten years,” adds Iván.
Modelia was founded in 2024 by Iván Rodríguez (CEO, a third-time serial entrepreneur and member of the Endeavor network since 2015) and René Haas (CTO, PhD in generative AI and computer vision).
A visual campaign that traditionally required weeks of production, model coordination, photography, editing, and adaptation by channel can now allegedly be produced in hours, maintaining brand consistency across collections, geographies, and commercial formats.
Today’s funding comes after a period of sustained monthly sales growth of 15%. In the last six months, the platform has reportedly processed more than 300,000 SKUs and is working with brands from 26 countries.
Modelia is working with brands such as Desigual, AWWG, and Fútbol Emotion to generate and adapt product visuals for different commercial channels – aiming to reduce production times and expanding the volume of visual assets they can generate per collection. It was an official partner of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid for its March 2026 edition and will return in September for its 40th anniversary.
“What convinced us about Modelia was finding a team that combines top-tier technical execution with a deep understanding of the sector they serve. In applied AI, every advance in large models does not narrow the space for vertical startups – it expands it. The competitive moat is no longer in the model; it’s in the application layer, in industry-specific workflows, and in the user experience.
“Modelia understood before anyone else that fashion brands don’t want to choose between AI models – they want production results. We see Iván and René, along with their team, as the natural candidates to lead this vertical globally,” explains Patricia Pastor, founder and General Partner at Next Tier.
Modelia says they will allocate the new funding to complete its enterprise platform layer, with new capabilities for consistency, style control, business rules, approval workflows, cross-team collaboration, and APIs to integrate into the e-commerce processes of major brands.
The company will also strengthen its commercial expansion in Europe and the United States, its two main markets, with a focus on enterprise accounts in the fashion sector. The United States accounts for 44% of its global sales and Europe for 27%, with additional presence in Asia and other markets.
In parallel, Modelia has begun the certification process with the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) with the goal of becoming the first visual generation company in the fashion sector to obtain this standard.
“We are in a period of rapid growth for the ecosystem: each new generation of general-purpose models reduces costs and latency, and unlocks enterprise use cases that, until just a few months ago, were not viable due to ROI concerns. In this context, value is shifting toward the orchestration and application layer: deciding which model solves each task, integrating it into real-world workflows, and ensuring brand fidelity at scale. This is precisely where Modelia comes in,” says Iván.
The platform has also made the leap into the educational sphere: IED Milano has incorporated Modelia into its second-year Fashion Design programme, integrating it into the workflow of future designers alongside ideation tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
“We are aware of where we stand: a young company in a category that is still being defined. Every advance in large language models makes us stronger, not weaker, because our job is not to compete with them but to turn them into reliable industrial production for a brand. We have the right team, technology, clients, and investors to aspire to lead this category globally,” adds Iván.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/06/used-by-desigual-awwg-and-futbol-emotion-spanish-ai-fashion-platform-modelia-raises-e1-03-million/
