In an industry where a single product photo can make or break a sale, Aiuta is offering fashion brands a faster, more scalable alternative to traditional content production.
While the fashion industry has embraced e-commerce and influencer marketing, the process of creating product visuals remains largely manual. Brands still depend on expensive studio shoots, stylists, and post-production teams, often repeating the same process for every new color, size, or season. Aiuta set out to change that with technology built to automate what has long been one of retail’s most time-consuming and costly workflows.
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Led by industry veterans from Farfetch, Amazon Fashion, and LVMH, Maísa Benatti (CEO) and Sergey Akimov (CTO), the fashion tech startup is already working with enterprise clients generating over $500 million in annual revenue and is currently in advanced discussions with companies exceeding $2 billion in global sales. The company recently pitched as a finalist at the Startup World Cup Cyprus 2025 Regional Finals, where it showcased a platform capable of turning raw product images into styled visuals in seconds.
In this interview with The Future Media, Aiuta’s CTO, Sergey Akimov, shares how the company was born out of a frustration with traditional content production, why they chose Cyprus as their core tech base, and how they’re helping global fashion retailers cut costs, reduce returns, and reimagine the online shopping experience.
The Multi-Billion Dollar Problem
The global AI in fashion market size was valued at $2.23 billion in 2024 and is projected to increase from $3.14 billion in 2025 to over $60 billion by 2034, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 39%, according to market forecasts. This explosive growth reflects rising demand for automation in fashion retail, particularly in areas like product visualization, personalization, and customer experience.
The challenges Aiuta addresses are endemic to the industry: high return rates, expensive content creation, and rising customer acquisition costs. These pain points have become increasingly more urgent in recent years as online shoppers’ expectations grow in the digital age.
“Brands struggle with high return rates, expensive content creation, and rising customer acquisition costs, all while consumer expectations continue to grow,”
Sergey Akimov explains.
“Our team includes people with deep experience at companies like Farfetch and Amazon Fashion, so we understand these pain points from the inside. That perspective helped us realise we could build something faster, more scalable, and truly tailored to the needs of the fashion industry.”
An Operating System for Fashion
Aiuta positions itself as “an operating system for fashion,” offering brands a set of tools to generate product images, enable virtual try-on experiences, and personalize the shopping journey, all without traditional photo shoots and manual production workflows.
The process is straightforward: a brand uploads a product photo, and Aiuta generates styled model shots, clean flat lays, or try-on visuals within seconds. This streamlined approach has attracted major clients including Turkish e-commerce giant Hepsiburada, German fashion retailer About You, and Middle Eastern marketplace Namshi.
Early By-products
The Aiuta platform’s performance metrics point to impressive gains for its clients. In A/B testing conducted with their enterprise clients, Aiuta has delivered:
- 2x higher conversion rates when users interact with Aiuta-generated content
- 5% reduction in return rates, helping cut one of fashion e-commerce’s largest costs
- 8% of try-on images shared on social media, indicating strong user engagement
- Up to 10x reduction in operational costs for content creation compared to traditional workflows
These results reflect wider trends in the fashion industry. Top brands like Zara and H&M report 200% higher conversions, 64% fewer returns, and 25% better retention when implementing AI fashion solutions.
Cyprus: The Tech Hub
While Aiuta operates as a US-based company, its technology center is based in Cyprus, where the company develops its core product and builds its deep tech. The choice of Cyprus as a development hub reflects the island’s growing reputation as a startup-friendly environment.
“Cyprus has become an increasingly startup-friendly environment, with strong engineering talent, good infrastructure, and proximity to key markets,”
says Akimov.
“Even though our focus is global, Cyprus has been a great base for building high-performance technology with speed and focus.”
Aiuta’s participation in the Startup World Cup Cyprus Finals gave the team a chance to demonstrate how global, product-first companies can emerge from a local tech ecosystem. The Cyprus regional finals, now in their second year, offer a platform for over 100 startups to compete for a spot in the Grand Finale in San Francisco.
The Pitch Competition Experience
For the Aiuta team, presenting at the Startup World Cup was both “intense and exciting.” The challenge of boiling down a complex AI product into a three-minute pitch forced them to focus on their core value proposition.
“One thing that stood out was how many people approached us afterward and said they had not realised that fashion tech could go this deep or be this scalable,”
says Akimov, reflecting on the experience.
The competition provided valuable exposure to a larger audience who may not have previously come across their product, and connected Aiuta with other founders tackling important problems in their respective industries.
The Future of Fashion AI
With the company’s immediate focus on onboarding its next wave of enterprise clients, Aiuta is also expanding into new use cases around shopper engagement and personalization while continuing to grow its annual recurring revenue (ARR).
As demand grows for immersive retail experiences, the company sees growing relevance for its tools in areas like virtual try-on, AI-assisted styling, and generative content.
“We want Aiuta to become the default AI infrastructure for fashion,” explains Akimov. “Our goal is to support brands at every stage of the journey—from early design and trend prediction to personalized shopping and improving conversion.”
Aiuta’s success represents more than just another AI startup finding product-market fit. It demonstrates how artificial intelligence can address fundamental inefficiencies in traditional industries while creating new possibilities for customer engagement.
“We believe that AI should not just enhance efficiency but enable new ways of working and engaging with consumers,” Akimov emphasizes. “That is the future we are building toward.”
As the fashion industry continues to grapple with sustainability concerns, cost pressures, and changing consumer expectations, tools like Aiuta’s may prove essential for brands looking to remain competitive in an increasingly digital marketplace.
The startup’s journey from Cyprus’s tech hub to working with billion-dollar brands suggests that the future of fashion retail may be more automated, personalized, and efficient than ever before. For an industry built on creativity and human expression, the challenge will be ensuring that technological advancement enhances rather than replaces the human elements that make fashion meaningful. Aiuta’s vision points to a future where both can coexist.
