- eComID raised $17 million in its seed funding round, with Systemiq Capital as the lead investor, supported by H&M Group and Stadium.
- The company has gone beyond reducing returns and now provides a cross-brand shopping passport that enables AI agents to shop on the customer’s behalf using the customer’s context.
- A €2.75 million pre-seed round was completed at the beginning of 2024, and eComID states that it currently reaches 20 million shoppers each month across more than 60 brands.
Since the first online traction in 1994, e-commerce has been working towards improved online personalisation. After many years leading H&M’s digital customer experience globally, Oscar Rundqvist realised that no single brand could address this issue on its own.
In a conversation with Tech Funding News, Rundqvist shares, “This issue can’t be solved on its own, as the entire industry has to get involved. AI lacking context has to start from scratch. The ideal shopping experience should be similar to walking into a shop that already knows you.”
His startup, eComID, has secured $17 million in seed funding from Systemiq Capital to create a shopping passport for AI shopping.
This round follows a pre-seed round in March 2024, led by CapitalT, with H&M Group Ventures participating. Both of these investors have again taken part in the current round, joined by Regeneration.VC, Course Corrected, and Stadium, Sweden’s largest sports and sports-fashion retailer, and an existing eComID customer.
How an H&M challenge led to a new company
Rundqvist co-founded eComID with Otto Nordgren, Alexander Real, Alexander Gårdenberg, Jaime Ferrando, and Patrick Rengifo in 2023. The company’s name stands for the e-commerce ID.
According to Rundqvist, it took approximately six months of discussions before H&M agreed to invest in the pre-seed round. He then resigned from H&M to work on eComID full-time with his co-founding team, and since then, H&M Group Ventures, formerly known as H&M CO:LAB, has supported eComID in all of its funding rounds.
The Stockholm-based startup now works with over 60 fashion brands and claims to reach 20 million shoppers each month.
What is a shopping passport?
The shopping passport links with a brand’s pre-purchase tools, such as sizing, search, and product discovery. Once, shoppers have to input their sizing, fit, and style preferences. This information is stored in their eComID account and can then be used across all participating brands.
“You, as a shopper, should always be in control of your personalisation data,” Rundqvist says to TFN.
The system is based on consent, meaning that shoppers choose what data they want to share with each brand. eComID and the retailers do not share any data without permission. For instance, if a shopper notes a particular fit with one brand, they then receive accurate recommendations from the other brands without having to re-enter their details.
The solution offered by eComID is modular, allowing brands to select from different solutions, making the pre-purchase journey smarter — for example, AI sizing, conversational search and discovery, or all of the above. Rundqvist states that if brands use more than one module, the system links the data to provide better recommendations, for example, by using sizing history to improve search results.
With regard to competition, Rundqvist names True Fit and Bloomreach. Other competitors include Nosto’s personalisation engine and Shopify’s AI storefront tools. Both tools operate within each retailer’s own data, but eComID believes its passport will become more valuable as more brands join, creating a greater long-term opportunity.
eComID is by no means the only Nordic or European fashion personalisation startup to have secured external funding. Hey Savi has raised £2.2 million in the UK for its AI fashion search service, and Pixyle AI has raised € 1 million in Amsterdam for visual product tagging.
Systemiq Capital’s Gemma Bloemen said, “eComID is solving a structural problem in digital commerce: AI cannot personalise without context. This phenomenal team deeply understands the needs of the brands and has built a product that aligns a better shopper experience with stronger economics and fewer unnecessary returns. Its traction and speed of execution are world-class.”
Janneke Niessen, co-founding partners of CapitalT, described her firm’s ongoing commitment in terms of the founding team: “At CapitalT, we back exceptional teams using technology to solve real-world problems and build a better, more sustainable future. eComID embodies that mission. They’ve shown that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.”
What comes next
According to eComID, shoppers who use its platform have a return rate that is 30% lower, whereas the partner brands, including COS, Axel Arigato, and Peak Performance, witness a 10% rise in their conversion rates. The company has attained this level of growth without having a dedicated sales or marketing team.
The startup currently employs 17 people and intends to put the money raised towards international expansion, improving its sizing and discovery modules, and hiring.
The market for AI shopping assistants is expected to grow from $6.9 billion this year to nearly $20 billion by 2030, with major companies vying for market share. Amazon has extended its Rufus assistant, while OpenAI has added checkout functionality to ChatGPT.
It remains to be seen whether this type of interface will be controlled by a retailer, an AI research lab, or a system that stays with the shopper across different platforms, as eComID proposes.
