EDITD scores $1.6m to help fashion industry mine the social web and more big data

EDITD, the London-based startup that offers a retail monitoring and analytics platform for the fashion industry, has raised a $1.6 million “seed round” led by Index Ventures. Alex Zubillaga, Atlas Venture, High Line Venture Partners, Sylvie Gabriel and Joanne Wilson have also participated.

The new funding will be used to further develop EDITD’s product offering, including increasing the amount of data being analysed, along with entering new markets and expanding the team “globally”. Robin Klein of Index will also join the company’s board as chairman.

EDITD, a previous Seedcamp 2010 winner, aims to use technology to spot fashion trends ahead of time to enable fashion brands and retailers to be more efficient in production and inventory as well as get a grip on competitors, something that can use a little help given the heavy discounting that goes on to shift unwanted stock.

It does this in part by mining the social web – blog posts, Tweets, Facebook – along with the net in general to measure “what’s being talked about, what’s selling and what isn’t, and what the next big thing will be in the fashion world”. The idea then is that via EDITD, brands can utilise this information to get a competitive edge when placing orders, determining pricing and managing inventory overall.

In other words, EDITD is a big data play made possible by the explosion in social media usage. In fact, it says that more than two million products and 300,000 new opinions are measured by the company daily.

Index Venture is being talked up as a particularly good fit for EDITD too given that the VC firm has invested in an array of fashion-related technology and e-commerce site, including Net-a-Porter, Etsy, and ASOS.