Mango invests in digital avatar creation start-up

Mango has announced an investment into Union Avatars, a digital avatar creation platform that will take part in the Spanish retail group’s start-up accelerator programme.

This investment marks the fourth firm to be supported by Mango’s StartUp studio, adding to the previously invested in La Más Mona, Payflow and Recovo.

With Union Avatars, Mango will offer financial support through a convertible participation programme, as well as mentoring and consultancy sessions from various experts in the regions of market knowledge and technology.

Mango said that it is also looking to explore pilot trials to create hyper-realistic avatars that can be used within different points of its value chain. Founded in 2020 by Cai Felip and Jordi Conejero, Union Avatars allows companies and users to form digital identities via its provided tools to create avatars for various social media platforms, virtual reality environments and gaming.

The investment comes as brands increasingly begin to turn to the use of virtual models as a way to both cut costs and integrate efficient forms of technology into their operations.

One brand that has already adopted such a feature into its e-commerce channels is that of Levi’s, which announced earlier this year that it would also be testing AI-generated clothing models as a way to “supplement human models”.