Iceland's Sowilo Raises Pre-Seed Funding to Expand Catecut, Its AI-Powered Fashion Product Intelligence Platform

Reykjavik‑based fashion technology startup Sowilo has secured a pre‑seed funding round to support the global rollout of its AI‑powered product intelligence platform, Catecut, alongside the launch of a new Shopify app aimed at online fashion retailers.

The round attracted backing from Iceland's Kría fund, along with TGC Capital, a firm with operations spanning the Netherlands and India, as well as angel investors based in Iceland and Australia.

Automating a Costly, Time‑Consuming Bottleneck

Catecut uses proprietary AI to analyze fashion product images and automatically generate product titles, descriptions, metadata, tags and SEO‑friendly content for online retailers. The platform is built to automate a process that fashion brands and marketplaces have historically handled manually, often at significant cost and with considerable delay between when a product photo is taken and when it appears fully optimized on a retailer's website.

According to the company, poor or inconsistent product content management costs the global fashion e‑commerce industry billions of dollars each year, largely because manual content creation slows down how quickly new inventory becomes searchable and sellable online. By automating title generation, descriptions and search‑friendly tagging directly from product imagery, Catecut aims to compress that timeline from what can take weeks down to a matter of seconds per product listing.

Targeting Retailers Directly Through Shopify

The launch of a dedicated Shopify app marks an important distribution move for Sowilo, giving the company a more direct path to the large base of small and mid‑sized fashion retailers that run their online stores through the Shopify platform. Rather than requiring custom integrations for every retailer, a native app listing allows Catecut to plug directly into existing product catalogs and update product detail pages automatically as new inventory is added.

This kind of direct‑to‑retailer distribution strategy has become increasingly common among AI commerce tools looking to scale quickly without needing large enterprise sales teams, since Shopify's app ecosystem gives smaller vendors a way to reach thousands of potential customers who are already set up to install new tools with minimal friction.

Part of a Broader Wave of AI Fashion Tools

Sowilo's raise comes amid growing investor interest in startups applying AI specifically to fashion product content and discovery. Similar companies building AI tools for the fashion and retail sector have attracted meaningful funding over the past year, spanning categories from AI‑powered shopping search engines to platforms that translate technical product attributes into more consumer‑friendly language for improved site search and personalization.

That broader trend reflects a persistent industry pain point: fashion brands invest enormous effort into product photography and descriptions, yet much of that content still needs to be manually adapted for search engines, marketplaces and different retail platforms, creating exactly the kind of repetitive, high‑volume task that AI models are well suited to automate.

What Comes Next for Sowilo

With fresh pre‑seed capital in place, Sowilo's near‑term priority is expanding Catecut's reach beyond its existing base and establishing its Shopify app as a meaningful acquisition channel for new retail customers. The company's ability to prove out measurable gains in product page speed to market and search visibility for early customers will likely determine how quickly it can expand beyond its initial base into larger international fashion markets.