Body positive app raises $1 million in seed funding to expand her business

Sydney-based body positive app raises $1 million in seed funding to expand her business

A Sydney-based fashion tech startup has raised more than $1 million from local and global investors completing its seed funding round.
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A Sydney-based fashion tech startup founded by Sarah Neill has raised more than $1 million from local and global investors. 

The investors of Neill’s body-positive app, Mys Tyler, included venture funds Mirvac Ventures, Antler Global and prominent angel investor and former CEO of Westpac, Brian Hartzer.

Neill says she built the body positive app to solve the $1 trillion “fit” problem by building an empowering and personalised shopping experience for women. 

“It started as an idea to make shopping easier for consumers by helping them find clothes that fit, but the true impact of Mys Tyler has been much greater,” Neill said.

“It’s turned into a community of body empowered women whose lives have truly been impacted for the better since using the app. In our recent survey, 43 percent of women said they were more body confident as a result of Mys Tyler.” 

“With the support and backing of our board and investors, we’re looking forward to using this capital to ramp up product development and growth globally,” she added. 

Neill has been working in marketing and innovation for large consumer technology brands for more than 15 years. She’s also not new to the entrepreneurial scene – in the past she founded Doodad, a sim-provider app, as well as A Relatively Unique In, a location-detecting app. 

Her latest creation, Mys Tyler, is an app that combines AI and human-based recommendations enabling users to easily discover items that suit their unique physical characteristics by receiving recommendations on what to wear, and how to style them, from real, like-bodied women around the world. 

More than 83,000 women from across 100 countries have already downloaded the Mys Tyler app. Seventy percent of users are from the United States, Australia and the U.K. These promising figures have attracted many local and global investors who are keen to invest in the future of fashion.

The General Manager of Retail for Australian property group, Mirvac said in a statement that the app is a strategic investment to help shape the future of retail business.

“As a group, we are heavily invested in supporting progressive brands and entrepreneurs with purpose and truly believe the future of fashion will integrate sustainability, convenience, and physical and digital spaces,” Kelly Miller said. 

“This partnership with Mys Tyler will provide opportunities for us to bring our respective digital and physical communities together.”

“Combining our audiences gives us greater insights into trends across the globe, while providing opportunities to co-create, bring partners together and, most importantly, inspire our combined communities.”

The app was built with and invested in by Antler in 2020. Bede Moore, the Managing Partner of Antler said that as the business has grown, “Antler has followed on investing in the company, recognising the impressive traction it has achieved in the past 12 months.”

“Mys Tyler is an innovative solution to two interlocking challenges facing online fashion retailers: fit and returns,” Moore said. “These issues cost online retailers billions of dollars annually, and we were impressed by Sarah’s human-led approach to this problem from day one.”

Neill said she started thinking about the app back in 2014 when she was living in New York.

“I’ve been thinking about it for years, and finally decided to quit my job, and return to Sydney to bring it to life,” she said. “The messages of thanks from early users is beyond anything that I had anticipated. I thought we would create something functional, but we’ve tapped into something so much more important and are incredibly proud to be helping women feel more confident in themselves as we create a space where women feel welcomed, represented and supported.”

The app is free and launched in Google Play and the App Store in August 2020. So far, it has amassed over 75,000 downloads.

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