Christie's Ventures, Tory Burch Join $6.4M Seed Round for Web3 Fashion Startup mmERCH

Colby Mugrab

London auction house Christie’s venture unit and fashion designer Tory Burch have joined a $6.4 million seed round for Web3 fashion startup mmERCH. The round, led by Liberty City Ventures, gave the New York-based company a post-money valuation of $25.7 million.

Other investors include Sacramento, Calif.-based Flamingo DAO, 6529 Holdings, Web3 fashion consortium Red DAO, and a galaxy of individuals from business, fashion, technology and crypto — Paxos co-founder Charles Cascarilla, Web3 investor Mike Jacobellis, collector Daniel Maegaard (aka Seedphrase) and model Karlie Kloss.

Art Meets Tech

Colby Mugrabi, who runs the digital art digest Minnie Muse, is the founder of mmERCH. She seeks to combine art, fashion, and technology to create singular pieces of so-called “neo-couture.” The company is due to release its inaugural collection in April.

Christie’s Ventures, established in 2022, works with early-stage companies at the intersection of art and technology. It considers startups in four broad areas — Web3, AI, FinTech and hardware. Its portfolio companies include Art Money, Atomic Form, Echomark, LayerZero, Manifold and Proto.

The iconic auction house’s new venture division is led by Devang Thakkar, a former Microsoft executive with a deep understanding of technology. Before joining Christie’s he spent four years at consumer marketplace Artsy, where he oversaw the rollout of its auction technology and business.

Before joining Artsy in 2015, Thakkar spent 11 years at Microsoft, working on major operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 10, and other product lines such as Bing, MSN and Teams. Thakkar holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in computer science from Columbia University, and an MBA in finance from the University of Washington.

Fashion Power

Burch, 57, is not only a fashion designer but an entrepreneur, serving her eponymous company as executive chairman and chief creative officer. An art history major, she started her designing career at Benetton and moved to New York to work for Yugoslavian designer Zoran.

Later in her career, Burch worked at Harper’s Bazaar, and went on to hold public relations and advertising positions at Vera Wang, Polo Ralph Lauren and Loewe. In 2020, Forbes ranked her 88^th in its list of most powerful women in the world.

“We are thrilled to have such a caliber of investors — all of whom are true visionaries across fashion and Web3,” said Mugrabi, who holds a degree in art history and fashion business. “This investment marks a strong step towards realizing our vision of neo-couture, offering collections of unique, one-of-a-kind products that have evolving digital and physical utility.”

The company says its one-of-a-kind clothing will shake up the fashion industry. Each item in its first collection is being created via generative algorithms, with a non-fungible physical garment uniquely tied to its digital twin on a blockchain, with the blockchain integration verifying the authenticity of each product.

Emil Woods and Murtaza Akbar, the founding partners of Liberty City Ventures, called Mugrabi a “visionary entrepreneur who has the drive, team, and resourcefulness to achieve great things.” mmERCH is challenging convention in every aspect of the fashion industry, from ideation to supply chain to the customer experience, they added.