PARIS — Blng AI, a sketch-to-design GenAI and virtual studio for jewelry, announced Tuesday it had raised $3 million in seed funding.
The investment round was led by venture capital firm Speedinvest, with participation from Cove Fund, eSeed and Focal.
The funds will support the company’s preparations for the public launch of its design platform, helping it scale its teams in Europe and the U.S. and expanding its production capacity to meet demand from luxury brands and independent jewelers.
Blng AI’s goal is to reshape the design process by offering advanced AI tools that help to turn sketches into production-ready designs by doing away with time-consuming manual revisions and renderings.
Sketching using the Blng AI interface.
Courtesy of Blng AI
It offers three integrated AI-powered solutions that include instant design visualization; generation of high-fidelity marketing content that removes the need for photoshoots; and retail-oriented experiences geared towards real-time interactive customization.
“This year is all about rollout and refinement,” Blng AI cofounder and chief executive officer Valérie Leblond told WWD.
In the coming weeks, the company will launch its design software, which has a waitlist of over 4,000. It is also expanding the customization and automated marketing content services, and there are plans for a subscription-based app targeting a larger segment of the jewelry industry.
“At the same time, we’re laying the groundwork for the next stage of our business by gradually integrating our self-service and enterprise offerings into one unified platform,” she said. “The goal is an AI-powered creative suite that seamlessly connects designers, manufacturers and retailers with the goal to simplify collaboration, enable personalization at scale, and accelerate time to market.”
Blng AI was cofounded in 2023 by Leblond, who was previously program director of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design’s IDEAS research platform and had a decade-long role at Cirque du Soleil as senior manager of special projects leading creative partnerships in the R&D department; and Dumëne Comploi, who holds 10 engineering patents for his work spanning digital to physical design, vfx and immersive experiences. He has led the creation of AI-driven personalized avatars and characters at Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Streaming for some 12 years.
Blng AI offers solutions from sketch to rendered on-figure imagery.
Courtesy of Blng AI
“What sets them apart is their sophisticated and technical understanding of specialized materials like metals and gemstones, 3-D visualization and reflections, combined with an exceptionally intuitive platform that achieves a level of precision and realism that generic AI tools simply cannot match – their decade of experience at Disney Animatronics really comes to life here,” said Speedinvest’s Max Wilhelm, lauding Leblond and Comploi’s “infectious passion combined with a pipeline of top tier luxury brands.”
Last year, the startup received a special mention at the 2024 LVMH Innovation Award at VivaTech fair in Paris. The tech summit was “a turning point,” Leblond said. “It gave us extraordinary visibility—not just in luxury, but across the broader tech and creative industries.”
The company saw a dramatic surge of interest following its demonstration at the French luxury group’s booth that featured a Tiffany & Co. ring design in realistic rendered images. It led to “new enterprise relationships and opened doors to collaborations that might have taken years to build otherwise,” the CEO continued.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, the company also has a residence at Paris’ Station F tech hub through LVMH’s accelerator program.