Startup Circle: How is KiksAR using AI to change the fashion industry?

KiksAR founder Ms Kavita Jha is erudite with a strong academic background. She has completed her MBA from Pune University. Kavita holds deep domain experience of 15+ years. Prior to starting KiKsAR which began in 2019, she was a Vice-President at Ramyam Intelligence Labs, an Indian technology product startup in Analytics & AI/ML space. She took the company from scratch to a thriving European M&A in 5 years. Further, Kavita has enjoyed the roller coaster ride working for Technology startups handling global responsibility across geographies. She has also been responsible for Strategy, Product Management, Pre-sales, Engineering, Business Development & Human Capital Management at the top most level and large teams.

Translating business strategy into actionable goals, the tech enthusiast leads the development of KiKsARplatform development and algorithms. She is building a team of tech experts who will be responsible for delivering innovative products. This includes the user interface, applications and frameworks, to keep her brand at the forefront of the industry. Today, CiOL talks to Kavita about her latest venture, KiksAR.

1. What is KiksAR about? Tell us about the team

We are the only Virtual Try-On company with Styling and Fitment advisory across categories for Fashion Retail. Our categories are: Apparel, Eyewear, Jewellery, Makeup, Accessories (masks, hijabs, turbans, scarves)and Watches. Shoes will be launched shortly.

My connection with startup is a better love story than Twilight, right from the beginning of my career I have been working in start-ups. I love the challenges and dynamicity of a start-up. In my last 2 start-ups, I have been handling the Product development and I am a hardcore technology enthusiast at heart. We are 50+ team currently with 200+ year experience combined.

My Co-founder Kiran who is like sherlock of sales, handles Sales and Marketing at KiksAR and we both have been working together for the last 16 years and 3 start-ups together.

Apart from the co-founders, we are backed by a solid team of architects who drives our technology which is the core of our company.

2. How did you come up with the idea?

Bangalore Traffic affected me very badly and I am sure I am not the only one. I used to spend 4-5 hours traveling a day. This affected my personal life. Due to paucity of time, I always used to land up doing online shopping. Many times, the products I purchased did not meet my expectations resulting in returns which is more tiresome exercise. The picture that I saw on a model was different either in color, texture, or quality; or it didn’t really suit or fit especially when I bought clothes for my daughters.

This made me think about how I can solve this problem of providing real life like shopping experiences online. I realized that Virtual Try-On mapped with Styling and Fitment is the ultimate solution. This became the genesis of KiksAR’s Virtual Try-On Platform for Fashion Retail. I discussed this idea with Kiran, and we did a 6 months research on the state-of-the-art with AI and AR technologies and decided to start KiksAR in 2018.

3. What is the story behind the unique name?

Having worked in couple of startups earlier by each of our founding team members, we decided that KiksAR should be a culmination of our experience and we should be deriving maximum fun and joy equating to getting a kick every day in our journey of building this company, hence the name KiksAR

4. What is your business/market growth?

We have got lot traction from the market globally, specifically post pandemic we have seen 100% surge in enquiries and our technology makes purchases contactless both instore and online. Today, we have 30+ customers in ecommerce and 250+ retail stores across the globe and we are growing rapidly.

5. The pandemic has affected every sector. How are you coping?

One of the worst-hit industriesin the current pandemic is retail, right after travel and leisure. Our Virtual Try-On solution is completely contactless for both in store and online shopping. It is need of the hour for many businesses. And we are happy to support a lot of our customers continuing their business using our solutions during these tough times.

5. How does the algorithm work?

We use advanced and deep AI for Face/Body recognition and Image intelligence to build 3D modeling and all of this happening real time.

6. What are your Post-Covid plans?

We have a vision to change the way how shopping is done today either on a ecommerce platform or in a retail store, we want to make the shopping journey completely contact-less with our technology which is the need of the hour as well.

Our plan is to create the world’s largest 3D catalog cloud for “Try-On” we are launching Apparel for both instore and online. We are already having a good market presence in eyewear in the Indian market and globally as well. Also with apparel, we are planning to expand faster in India as well as in the US market and other geographies.

7. Funding

We are angel funded currently and will be going for an institutional early next year.