Ex-Mango founders' Artiso raises over €3 million pre-seed led by Criteria Venture Tech

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Artiso, a Barcelona start-up building what it calls an AI operating system for fashion teams, has raised more than €3 million in a pre-seed round made up entirely of equity. Criteria Venture Tech led it. That fund is run by Criteria Capital Risc, the technology investment arm of CriteriaCaixa, the holding company of the "la Caixa" banking foundation, and it has backed Artiso since the company came out of stealth in July 2025. Swanlaab Venture Factory and Bynd Venture Capital also invested. So did two angels: David Tomás, a co-founder of Cyberclick, and Nicolaj Reffstrup, who founded GANNI, ran it as chief executive, and now invests through Look Up Ventures. The founders still hold a majority of the shares, which at pre-seed is less a boast than the usual arrangement.

The three founders, Sarah Iglesias Hiller (CEO), Lucas Pastur Romay (product) and Matthias Brenninkmeijer (technology), are former Mango executives who have worked together since 2022 and set up the company in Barcelona in 2025. Their pitch is that a fashion brand's work is scattered across product lifecycle software, design programs, image generators, shared drives, spreadsheets and email, and that each season some of what the brand learned, such as which colours sold, quietly goes missing. Iglesias Hiller describes years of running creative teams on "tools that never spoke to each other." Artiso's answer is a single platform, built on a memory of each brand's archive, bestsellers and visual codes, whose AI agents carry a collection from moodboards and flat sketches through product development to tech packs, virtual models, on-model photos and campaign content.

The company says a full tech pack takes about four minutes rather than two to six hours. It also says the platform can cut product development time by up to 70%, make the path from concept to campaign five times faster, and lower the cost of producing commercial imagery by up to 90%. These are the company's figures; an industry that reinvents its products every season is a natural place to try them. Roughly a year after launch, Artiso works with mid-sized and large brands, from companies in the middle of a transformation to luxury houses, plus the retailers and manufacturers that supply them, across Europe, North America and Asia, with the United States a key market. The money will go into developing the platform, hiring in both fashion and technology, helping customers roll it out across their organisations, and international expansion.