mannyAI Raises £1.1M to Bring AI Production Planning to Fashion and Furniture Manufacturing

mannyAI, a UK artificial intelligence company, has raised £1.1 million from Alante Capital, Carbon13, Dreamcraft Ventures, and Plug and Play Tech Center to develop its AI-powered production planning and sourcing marketplace platform. The company is building tools for fashion and furniture manufacturers that combine intelligent production planning — helping brands forecast demand, plan production runs, and manage supplier capacity — with a marketplace connecting manufacturers with vetted suppliers of materials, components, and production capacity.

Fashion and furniture manufacturing are industries with notoriously complex and fragmented supply chains. Both involve the orchestration of multiple tiers of suppliers — raw material providers, component manufacturers, assembly facilities, and logistics operators — across geographically dispersed networks, often with significant lead times that require brands to commit to production orders months before the season or product launch they are targeting. Managing this complexity manually, through spreadsheets and direct relationships with a fixed set of suppliers, leaves most brands vulnerable to demand forecast errors, supplier capacity constraints, quality issues, and the cost of over- or under-production.

mannyAI addresses this by applying AI to the production planning process. The platform analyses historical sales data, seasonal patterns, and market signals to generate demand forecasts that inform production scheduling decisions. It maps out supplier capacity across the marketplace to help brands identify production options that match their requirements and timelines. And it provides visibility into the status of production runs across the supply chain, giving brands and manufacturers a shared operational picture that reduces the communication overhead and error rate of managing complex multi-supplier production programmes by email and phone.

Carbon13's involvement as an investor reflects the carbon reduction potential of more efficient production planning: overproduction is one of the most significant sources of waste and carbon emissions in the fashion industry, and better demand forecasting directly reduces the volume of product manufactured that is never sold.

The funding will be used to develop the platform, build the supplier and manufacturer network, and grow the brand client base in the UK and internationally.

Sources

• mannyAI — company website