Lalaland (company)

Lalaland is an Amsterdam-Based Dutch tech startup that creates artificial intelligence based virtual models for e-commerce.

History
The startup was co-founded in 2019 by Michael Musandu and Ugnius Rimsa. Lalaland states that the concept of creating AI based synthetic, full-body virtual supermodels is aimed to replace the traditional human models to reduce cost to vendors and to increase diversity in product representation.

In April 2020, Lalaland received a pre-seed funding from Amsterdam-based venture capital fund ASIF Ventures. In May 2020, Lalaland won the 15th Philips Innovation Award. In June 2021, the startup received €350.000 funding from Google under its program to fund the ventures initiated by the people of color.

In January 2022, Lalaland won the Tommy Hilfiger Fashion Frontier Challenge, which includes a prize of €100,000 and mentorship opportunities.

In June 2022 Lalaland raised €2.1M in a new pre-Series-A round of funding.

In March 2022 Michael and Ugnius made it to the European Forbes 30 under 30 list in the retail and e-commerce list, which identifies entrepreneurs under the age of 30 who, the Forbes page notes, are “reinventing how we shop, both online and offline.”. The same month, Levi Strauss & Co. announced a partnership with the aim for later this year, to test AI-generated models to supplement human models, increasing the number and diversity of their models for their products in a sustainable way.