MannyAI wants to become brands and manufacturers’ right-hand man for small-batch production.
The United Kingdom-based startup focused on coordinating quick-turnaround production with better sustainability outcomes, has raised €1.26 million ($1.33 million) in a pre-seed round, complemented by a €240,000 ($253,900) grant from Innovate UK (IUK), the founders told Sourcing Journal exclusively.
Dreamcraft Ventures led the pre-seed round, with additional participation from Alante Capital, Plug and Play EMEA, Carbon13, Ventures Together and PDS Ventures.
MannyAI uses artificial intelligence systems to help brands curb overproduction by leveraging a test-and-repeat model, made possible by matching them with factories willing to produce in smaller quantities: 200 to 500 units, in most cases. It plans to use the pre-seed funding to add technology and business development to its team, which will bring it to a crew of seven full-time employees. It will also continue to build out other technology-enabled features for clients.
The startup, co-founded by Shruti Grover, CEO, and Simon Johnson, chief technology officer, has dual functionality: it can be used by both brands and factories.
On the brand side, customers can import tech packs for designs they want to produce. MannyAI’s systems read the tech pack, identifying the necessary components for the design and assigning a difficulty score based on the level of intricacy in the garment.
Once the system has done preliminary assessments, the buyer sees a list of factories able to make the requested quantity in a short period of time—often two weeks or less—as well as the factory’s difficulty preferences, capacity for accepting new orders and a suggested price per unit.
Johnson said the goal is to reduce overproduction by taking a test-and-repeat approach—that is to say, ordering about one-tenth as many units as a brand might order for a standard collection, then reordering based on the style’s success.
“Instead of producing up front and having to forecast what is going to be popular that season, MannyAI is instead a system where brands can match demand through test and repeat,” he explained.
Factories can then negotiate on brands’ suggested price per unit based on the cost of the fabric necessary, the difficulty of the design and the labor needed to fulfill the order.
Once a manufacturer accepts the job, MannyAI helps them build a schedule to optimize production times, labor needed and more. That schedule breaks the process and the hours into digestible, easily actionable plans.
Because the system understands the intricacies of each design, down to the buttons, rivets and stitching patterns, it can identify overlap between individual styles—often called jobs in the manufacturing world—even if they are part of separate orders.
“Currently, the way a factory would work is they would do all the jobs within an order together, because they want to ship it out. [MannyAI] enables them to look simultaneously at all the jobs across the different orders, no matter what the brand is. The AI will find the similarities between individual styles and club them together while ensuring everything goes out,” Grover said.
For instance, if two separate brands each order slippers to complement their apparel collections, the factory can finish two slipper jobs back to back, rather than changing out the injection mold, focusing on another order, then having to put the mold back on the machine. Whether or not a factory has brand partners using MannyAI, it can use the system to manage and take charge of its jobs.
When Grover and Johnson first started working on MannyAI, they focused on the quantity of one—also known as made to order. But after doing in-store pop ups and running a small factory in central London for a short period of time, they quickly realized that model wouldn’t be optimal, particularly for larger brands and retailers.
“The quantity of one creates too many inefficiencies, and what we really needed to do [was] think about how we can do small batch and a quantity of anywhere between 200 and 500. That can totally revolutionize things for larger brands,” Grover said.
Mathilde Lyet, principal at Dreamcraft, said Grover and Johnson’s fervor for tackling the supply-demand gap caught her interest from the time she first learned about MannyAI.
“MannyAI’s digital twin-powered AI platform addresses a critical pain point I recognized from my previous role at Maersk, offering a breakthrough solution that empowers brands to adopt just-in-time production and optimize factory operations,” Lyet told Sourcing Journal.
As Grover and Johnson grow their team, they expect their capacity for recruiting clients to increase; they’ve set a lofty goal for themselves when it comes to customer acquisition over the next several years.
“Our target is to get 300 factories adopting the system and feeling confident that they can do small-batch production profitably,” Grover said, noting that the company will look to hit that benchmark by August 2026.
She further noted that working in tandem with brands could be the easiest way to achieve that goal. By Grover’s estimate, if MannyAI could secure contracts with six to seven brands willing to bring their best manufacturers along with them, the company would hit its goal quickly. Today, two multi-brand retailers, ASOS and Zalando, and three factories—two in the United Kingdom and one in France—use MannyAI’s technology.
“The truth of the matter is that brands hold a lot of cards…so if they are the ones who start to introduce this technology to their factories, then hitting our targets will be easy,” Grover told Sourcing Journal. “It’s time for brands to start getting strategic about their excess production and how they’re going to solve inventory issues.”
Zalando, one of MannyAI’s first customers, has already begun the work of evaluating its suppliers. Matthias Hurler, director private label product supply for the European retailer, said this technology solution could help Zalando meet its needs more readily.
“As Zalando consolidates its supplier network, we’re exploring AI-driven solutions that can support real-time production planning across factories. MannyAI’s technology offers promising capabilities for enhancing agility, streamlining resource use and helping suppliers better align production with demand, supporting both operational efficiency and sustainable practices,” Hurler said.
While smaller batches have long piqued some brands’ interest, MannyAI could also aid brands in developing their strategies for a newer trend: nearshoring. Grover and Johnson said they recommend brands only partner with manufacturers that can transport goods by road within one week’s time. For those in the UK, those suppliers could be as far as Morocco.
For many companies, nearshoring can prove an expensive endeavor, primarily due to increases in labor costs. Grover said that even though costs can increase on single units by up to 25 to 30 percent, companies’ sales offset the extra cost of making the goods.
“Imagine a brand is buying 3,000 units and has now shifted to 200 initial units followed by repeats. The lead time is dropping. Their price is increasing, but bear in mind that this is being offset by no further discounts. There are no 50 percent off sales; they are no unsold or breakeven sales. The net profit increases in this scenario,” she explained.
And investors, particularly Dreamcraft, are intrigued by that proposition.
“With regulatory pressures mounting and a trend toward nearshoring, MannyAI is uniquely positioned to help brands reduce waste, boost profitability and adapt to the demands of a rapidly evolving industry,” Lyet said.
In the future, Grover and Simon see partnering with U.S. brands, as well as onshore factories or manufacturers in Mexico and South America, as a major opportunity for growth, particularly as the Trump administration toys with tariffs next year.
Grover’s conviction that brands can remain profitable while nearshoring, paired with a penchant for helping both manufacturers and brands decrease their carbon footprints, means that MannyAI will continue to be a nearshoring-heavy solution.
“This technology is a no-brainer for nearshoring,” she said. “We aren’t at all marketing this as something which brands who are selling in the UK [and EU] can use to consolidate their Chinese suppliers, because ultimately, the carbon emissions savings—which is what we’re after in reducing overproduction—will get negated by air transport.”
