Modelia is a Madrid-based B2B platform specialising in AI-generated image creation and management for the fashion industry, founded in 2024 by Iván Rodríguez and René Haas. The pitch is straightforward: fashion brands spend enormous amounts of time, money, and logistics on product photography, models, studios, lighting, location, post-production, and Modelia replaces a significant portion of that pipeline with AI-generated visuals that are true to the garment and consistent with the brand’s visual identity. The company just closed a $1.2 million seed funding round led by Spanish AI-focused fund Next Tier, with US-based Rapid Scale and Archipelago Next also participating. The US is currently its largest market.
How It Works
Modelia enables brands and retailers to create highly realistic, customisable digital models wearing their garments in seconds, with the ability to modify model attributes such as age, ethnicity, size, and background, allowing for inclusive and dynamic campaigns tailored to diverse audiences. The platform is designed for industrial-scale production, not one-off experiments. It is already working with brands including Desigual, AWWG, and Fútbol Emotion to generate and adapt product visuals for different commercial channels, reducing production times and expanding the volume of visual assets generated per collection.
The distinction Modelia draws is between generating an image and producing fashion imagery at scale. As CEO Iván Rodríguez put it: “Artificial intelligence has made the ability to generate an image accessible to anyone. But producing fashion imagery at an industrial scale, true to the garment, true to the brand, issue after issue, collection after collection, remains a craft.” That craft is what Modelia is building the infrastructure for.
Beyond the Studio
Modelia was an official partner of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid in March 2026, working with twenty emerging designers through the EGO Showroom to transform their hero pieces into editorials and virtual runway shows generated entirely with AI. The move into fashion education followed: IED Milano has incorporated Modelia into its second-year Fashion Design programme, integrating it into the workflow of future designers alongside tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. A platform that starts in a production workflow and ends up in a university curriculum is building something longer than a product feature.
Why It Matters for Fashion
The fashion industry has been talking about AI’s role in creative production for years, but most of the conversation has stayed theoretical. Modelia is operational, with real clients, real collections, and a funding round that suggests investors believe the category is ready to scale. For brands under pressure to produce more content across more channels at lower cost, an AI infrastructure that maintains brand consistency and removes the logistics of a full photoshoot is a real solution. The question now is how far the category goes, and whether Modelia gets there first.
