Machine learning has made it possible for bodies to move and talk like real humans. The question is whether such products can achieve a sustainable business model. Some of them have attracted investors.
Hillhouse Capital led an $8 million Series A financing round for Zmo.ai, a Chinese company founded by a team of Chinese entrepreneurs who have spent years studying and working abroad. GGV Capital was in the round.
The startup has found a healthy demand from fashion e-commerce companies that are struggling to hire and afford models due to their growing number of stock-keeping units as consumer tastes become more changeable. ZMO has created a piece of software to help them create virtual full bodies of models by defining simple parameters like face, height, skin color, body shape, and pose.
The entire cycle of garment manufacturing can take two to three months, from design, fabric selection, pattern making, modeling, to actually hitting the shelves.
We are shortening that process. Customers can test a piece of clothing on a virtual model by visiting the website. Once orders come in, the customer can start manufacturing.
It is unsurprising that fashion e-commerce operators would use ZMO. Shein, a fast fashion giant, is in talks with her company about possible collaborations.
A screen capture of a video.
We previously covered the Shenzhen-based startup that is working on synthetic media to replace humans in lifestyle photos and other commercial scenarios. The business attracted a surge in interest as China's e-commerce exporters were having a hard time finding foreign models as the country went into strict border controls.
GPT-3, which uses big data and deep learning to imitate the natural language patterns of humans, is going to be applied to create speeches for models. The feature would make it easy for companies to make TikTok videos quickly and cheaply for product promotion.
According to Roger Yin, co-founding Z, e-commerce companies spend around 3% of their annual gross merchandise value on photoshoots.
Images are a big part of e- commerce sales. Yin says that the problem is that the sales cycle is short but the cost of images is high. The goal of ZMO is to reduce the costs of photoshoots.
80% of ZMO's customers are based in China, but it is working to attract more overseas users this year using its new financial injection. The startup has 30 customers, including one of Shein's numerous challengers, and over 100.
Ma Liqian is a computer vision graduate from KU Leuven and is one of the co-founders of Zmo.
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