Dear customers, partners & friends,
You might have noticed that we raised our Series A recently. I’m writing this blog to let you know why we did this & what the impact will be on our customer relationships & their businesses.
As you know, at Smartex, we work tirelessly every day to solve big & relevant challenges we see in textile factories worldwide.
It still blows my mind how challenging our clients’ business is — I have a tremendous amount of respect & admiration for you & your ability to thrive in such a challenging industry.
These challenges comprise of textile pricing & margins, speed & quality of production, managing & training large teams, maintenance of expensive facilities & machinery, achieving operational excellence with the best price-performance ratio possible, & much more.
We started Smartex with an initial focus on defects & quality inspection because this is an apparent problem every textile factory faces. We know that the gross margins in this industry are typically very tight. As a result, for every roll rejected due to quality, the production of 10, 20, or more new defect-free textile rolls are necessary just to cover the costs of that rejected one.
Textile quality is sometimes subjective & difficult for humans to inspect, & there are infinite combinations of textile articles that make it extremely challenging to have a common single source of truth for textile quality assurance.
Smartex solves this problem with world-class patented software, hardware & Artificial Intelligence, developed completely in-house for tailored retrofit within textile factories to ensure a positive impact on our customers’ businesses. Orders of magnitude superior to anything in the market.
But that’s not enough… inspection & quality are not everything…
Now with ~3 years of sales experience & global presence, we have never been in a better position to hear & absorb all the great feedback & suggestions from our customers — from factory owners, c-levels, executives, sales teams, production & quality managers, facility maintenance professionals, textile workers in knitting, dyeing, inspection, all the way to the garment factories, fashion brands, investors, & many others whom we respect & admire.
Across the board, our customers, partners & prospects are asking for more, much more. More features, speed, geographies, local teams, integrations, etc etc etc…
That’s why we raised this investment round! Why we bring world-class investors such as H&M Group, DCVC, SOSV’s HAX, Spider Capital, Momenta Ventures, Bombyx Growth Fund, Faber, EXCapital and Fashion for Good with which Smartex initiated multiple projects with its partners such as the Kering Group (Gucci, Balenciaga, etc), PVH (Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, etc), Pangaia and others. To better serve our clients & their teams. To provide solutions that help textile factories move into a positive, automated, clean, prosperous future while doing the right thing!
After this our customers should expect:
Increasingly global decentralized technical support teams to better serve & help our customers wherever they are
Greater & faster upgrades of existing deployed devices
New product lines & add-ons to existing ones
More training sessions & the Smartex Academy Program
More remote support tools & more educational/training materials & much more!
I can’t wait to share our next releases with the world. Hope to see all our customers & prospects in their factories during my visits, or at ITMA 2023 in Milan, where Smartex will be present with a fantastic booth exhibiting our innovations.
Thank you for trusting in our team — please keep giving us feedback — we are here to serve the textile industry & provide tools for a better future!
Kind regards,
Gilberto Loureiro
