Iceland’s Sowilo raises pre-seed to expand AI-powered fashion product intelligence platform

Reykjavik isn't the first place you'd expect a fashion-tech startup to emerge from, but that's exactly where Sowilo has been quietly building Catecut, a tool that looks at a product photo and figures out what it's selling. Not just "shoe" or "dress" — it identifies design attributes, then spits out titles, descriptions, metadata and tags ready to drop into an online store. The company just closed a pre-seed round to push the product further, with backing from Iceland's Kría fund, TGC Capital operating out of the Netherlands and India, plus a handful of angel investors scattered between Iceland and Australia.

The timing lines up with Catecut's global debut on the Shopify App Store. That matters more than it might sound, because Shopify runs the storefronts for a huge chunk of small and mid-size retailers who don't have teams of copywriters sitting around tagging every SKU. Catecut promises to do that grunt work — multilingual descriptions, alt text for images, metadata tuned for search and, notably, for generative AI discovery too. That last bit is a small but telling detail: retailers are now optimizing not just for Google, but for whatever AI system might be summarizing search results or answering a shopping query directly.

Sowilo isn't starting from zero. Jewellery and apparel sellers in the US are already running Catecut, and the company has piloted the platform with larger international retailers before this public launch. Founder and CEO Heiðrún Ósk Sigfúsdóttir framed the raise as fuel for reaching both scrappy emerging fashion brands and bigger enterprise accounts, which is a fairly standard pitch — but the fact that the product already has paying users in a market as competitive as US apparel retail gives it more weight than the average pre-seed announcement.

What's interesting here isn't the funding amount, which wasn't disclosed, but the niche. Product content generation is a genuinely tedious, unglamorous problem that retailers have thrown underpaid interns and outsourced agencies at for years. If Catecut can do it reliably across languages and platforms, it's chasing a real budget line, not a hypothetical one. Whether a small Icelandic team can out-execute the dozens of other AI content startups circling e-commerce is the actual question the next twelve months will answer.