Antler Investor Memo Series: SeeStone is replacing guesswork with AI to reduce fashion waste and boost retail profits

Early stage investment company Antler Australia recently backed a new cohort of startups as part of its ongoing program to build great local tech companies.

Startup Daily is sharing the details of each venture in the “Antler Investor Memos” series, which is designed to give you a quick, sharp understanding of the startups and people involved, with many seeking follow up capital following Antler’s initial pre-seed investment.

Company: SeeStone

Founded: June 2024
Stage: Pre-seed
Founders: Nilufer Haksever (CEO) and Josh Leask (CTO)
Current investors: Antler
Currently raising: Yes

The Business

The fashion industry is one of the world’s biggest ethical, economic, and environmental challenges. Generating 92 million tonnes of textile waste annually and accounting for nearly 10% of global carbon emissions, fashion is in a perpetual state of oversupply driven by fleeting trends, social media, and consumer appetite.

If you think the water footprint of almond milk is bad, turn to your wardrobe, where a single cotton shirt can take up to 700 gallons of water to produce.

Outside of consumerism, one of the key reasons behind this pervasive issue is that fashion retailers face constant pressure to deliver novelty, launching fresh collections with limited historical data to guide buying decisions. With no direct data points to compare, retailers must rely on gut instinct and fragmented information, leading to unsold stock, missed sales, and ultimately, lost profits.

SeeStone’s mission is to eliminate the guesswork, and inefficiency inherent in seasonal buying decisions and reduce the financial and environmental burdens of overproduction.

The platform empowers retailers to make conscious purchasing choices using AI that analyzes vast amounts of data to deliver optimised predictions for retail buying decisions even for entirely new products. This AI quickly identifies hidden patterns in consumer behaviour, reducing human bias, and removing guesswork to ensure better inventory alignment and more profitable sales outcomes—all while reducing waste.

In turn, SeeStone’s platform drives sales growth, reduces excess stock, and increases profit margins. The result is a more profitable and sustainable approach to retail buying that can help fashion retailers stay competitive without contributing to overproduction and waste.

Antler investment thesis

“Each year, up to 40% of clothes go unsold, and the stock that goes to landfill costs retailers $500 billion annually. While the scale of the problem is huge, so is the opportunity, and SeeStone’s AI-powered platform has the potential to become an indispensable tool to tackle this,” says Mike Abbott, General Partner at Antler in Australia

“By analyzing millions of data points simultaneously, SeeStone’s AI can predict at a scale that human buyers cannot. We see the founders, Nilufer and Josh, as the perfect fit because of their domain expertise and technical prowess. This is key to helping SeeStone unlock a more sustainable and profitable future for fashion retail.”

Traction/milestones

Since its formation, SeeStone has made major advancements including a successful pilot with leading fashion retailer Brie Leon, where SeeStone’s AI predicted the sales quantities for products that had never been sold before. The result was a 33% improvement over initial sales forecasts, demonstrating the platform’s accuracy – even without the internal data there to support it – and potential for scalable impact.

Following this success, SeeStone secured two additional pilot programs with well-known fashion brands, each representing different customer archetypes.

SeeStone has also established strategic partnerships with organisations that align with its mission, such as Thread Together, a non-profit that addresses fashion’s waste crisis by redistributing surplus stock. SeeStone plans to collaborate with Thread Together in the new year to further reduce fashion waste, deepening its commitment to making a lasting environmental impact.

SeeStone has launched its MVP which integrates directly with retailers’ existing ERP systems. The platform offers key features designed to optimise buying decisions, such as AI-driven recommendations for first-time product buys, from selecting the right products to quantifying purchases and forecasting weekly sales – all within seconds. It also provides pricing benchmarks and flags potential errors, enabling retailers to make faster, smarter, and more profitable buying decisions while reducing overproduction and waste. With the MVP in the market, SeeStone plans to expand and scale its solution in the coming year.

Latest funding

Pre-Seed from Antler

Use of Funds

SeeStone’s initial funding from Antler has been used to develop the MVP, conduct pilot programs with major fashion brands, and build critical industry partnerships.

The funding will also enable the company to hire key talent, particularly in product development and data science, to support platform growth.

Additional funds will be used to enhance the platform’s enterprise features, expand its user base, and continue refining its AI technology to align with its goal of building a product that can serve large, multinational fashion retailers.

The founders say

“SeeStone’s journey began with Antler – the anchor that brought our cofounding team together, which has since become our biggest asset,” says CEO Nilufer Haksever.

“While we both had the skills and knowledge in our individual domains, Antler provided the platform for us to find each other and align our complementary strengths. Beyond that, Antler was key to sharpening our focus and identifying the real pain points to solve, ensuring that SeeStone delivers maximum impact and value.

“Fashion is one of the most wasteful industries in the world, and overproduction is at the heart of the problem. Our platform addresses this issue directly by helping retailers make optimised, data-driven buying decisions that reduce waste and increase profitability. It’s about creating a more sustainable future for the fashion industry, and we’re proud to be leading that charge.”

“The fashion retail industry, known for its data intensity and the mantra ‘retail is detail,’ is perfectly poised for disruption and ready to reap the benefits of AI.”

What’s next?

Antler, a global early-stage VC, is revealing its latest investments in ambitious Australian founders and startups. With over 120 investments in early-stage companies, SeeStone is one of its most recent portfolio companies.

Founders can apply here to Antler’s next residency in Australia commencing February 2025 in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.