The textile industry doesn't typically inspire Silicon Valley-style disruption narratives. Yet STCH, a Bangalore-based startup that emerged from stealth mode this April, is pitching exactly that: artificial intelligence applied to fabric development and contract manufacturing, with a $5.5 million Pre-Series A to prove investors are listening.
Omnivore, the India-focused venture firm known for backing agritech and climate-oriented companies, led the round. Kae Capital and Singapore's White Venture Capital came in alongside them. The funding announcement arrived April 23, 2026, marking STCH's formal debut after what appears to have been a quiet build period in 2025.
What the company calls itself matters here. "Not a sourcing company," according to STCH's own framing. Instead, the startup describes its work as fabric R&D married to supply chain optimization—AI as the connective tissue between trend forecasting, material science, and factory coordination. Whether that distinction holds up in practice remains an open question for customers and competitors alike.
The Zetwerk Alumni Network Expands
STCH's founding team reads like a reunion of sorts. Narahari Payala and Aseem Chitkara both came out of Zetwerk, the industrial manufacturing marketplace that has become something of a talent incubator in India's B2B startup scene. They're joined by Omprakash Makam. LinkedIn pegs the current team size between 11 and 50 employees—a range that reflects either rapid recent hiring or the usual imprecision of self-reported data.
The company's operational footprint spans Bangalore, Leicester, Delhi, and Tiruppur, tapping a network the founders say includes over 10 partner factories and what the company reports as more than 1,000 machines. It's a distributed model, one that borrows conceptually from the contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) playbook common in pharmaceuticals. Adapting that framework to textiles is the gamble.
Client names offer some validation of early traction. STCH lists Roman, Joe Browns, Shein, Crocodile, Being Human, CP Brands, and Rainforest among its customers, spanning markets in the UK, Europe, the US, and India. The company reports an order book exceeding $15 million—a figure that's company-provided and, as with most startup claims at this stage, not independently audited.
Sustainability as Sales Pitch and Substance
STCH's timing aligns with mounting pressure on fashion's environmental ledger. Global fiber production hit a record 124 million tonnes in 2023, per Textile Exchange's Materials Market Report published last September. More troubling for the industry: greenhouse gas emissions from fashion ticked upward that same year—the first increase since 2019—landing around 944 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, according to the Apparel Impact Institute. That's roughly 1.78% of all global emissions, though other methodologies push estimates as high as 8%, depending on what gets counted.
Against that backdrop, STCH's pitch centers on "responsible dyeing and chemistries to reduce water use," alongside work on biodegradable fiber blends intended to cut microplastic shedding. The company also emphasizes partnerships with audited factories. It's standard sustainability language at this point, perhaps, but operationalizing it at scale is where things get harder. The company claims a 95%-plus on-time delivery rate and says it has developed over 80 fabric variants to date. Those numbers, again, come directly from the company.
The planned fabric R&D lab, which the Economic Times reported as part of the funding use case, signals ambitions to move upstream. If STCH can position itself as a materials innovator rather than just a manufacturing coordinator, the margins and defensibility improve. That's the theory, anyway.
What Geographic Expansion Reveals
The company's near-term roadmap includes deeper mill partnerships across India and expansion into the US and Spain. Those market choices aren't random. The US remains the world's largest apparel consumer. Spain, meanwhile, is home to Inditex (Zara's parent company) and serves as a European hub for fast-fashion logistics.
Whether the CDMO-for-textiles model can scale across those geographies is the central test ahead. Contract manufacturing in fashion is notoriously fragmented, relationship-driven, and resistant to platform consolidation. Plenty of digitization efforts have stumbled on the gap between software logic and the messy realities of fabric mills, dye houses, and factory floors.
STCH's AI layer—whatever form it takes in practice—will need to deliver tangible speed or cost advantages to pull buyers away from incumbent relationships. The $15 million order book suggests early customers see something there. But pre-Series A traction and sustained growth at scale are different animals entirely.
For now, STCH has capital, a team with relevant operational chops, and a sustainability narrative that aligns with where institutional buyers say they want the industry to move. What happens when the R&D lab opens and the US launch unfolds will tell a clearer story than any funding announcement can.
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Note: Some aggregator sites initially reported this round at $7 million; company and investor sources confirm the figure is $5.5 million.
