The Series A funding round, led by European crypto investment firm Greenfield Capital, also featured participation from Slow Ventures, Warner Music, The Artemis Fund, and Red DAO, the digital fashion collective.
Recently, the startup DressX has already closed $1.3 million and $2 million rounds of investments.
Despite launching less than three years ago, DressX counts itself among the oldest and most established players in the rapidly evolving, metaverse-oriented economy of digital wearables. DressX designs virtual fashion items to be worn by virtual avatars both on-chain, as NFTs, and off-chain, as skins in non-blockchain-based gaming ecosystems. The company also creates augmented reality (AR) outfits that real-life users can wear as filters on social media platforms.
According to the publication, DRESSX co-founders Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova launched their virtual outfit project in August 2020. Prior to DRESSX, its founders were involved in the traditional fashion industry – they ran their own showrooms in Paris, and before that, they developed the Mercedes-Benz Kiev Fashion Days fashion week in Ukraine.
The company ruffled some feathers among the tightly-knit digital fashion ecosystem when it partnered with tech colossus Meta last July to bring digital outfits to the corporation’s off-chain Horizon World metaverse. Detractors argued the company was allying with the greatest opponent of—and obstacle to—an open, decentralized metaverse. DressX’s founders told Decrypt at the time that they were trying to bring digital fashion to the largest audience possible.
The red-hot blockchain-backed metaverse enthusiasm has undeniably cooled in the face of technological hurdles and the grueling bear market, so DressX’s bet may have been a smart one. Just yesterday, Meta announced plans to wind down support of NFTs on its platforms, axing a Web3-supportive initiative launched less than a year ago; DressX’s Horizon World offerings, which don’t live on the blockchain, were unaffected by the announcement.
