India’s fashion industry, one of the world’s biggest textile producers, is getting a reality check. The formerly resource-hungry, high-waste sector is experiencing the arrival of a new type of disruptor: climate tech startups fuelled by AI, which are redefining the way fashion is designed, manufactured, and distributed. From tracking emissions to forecasting waste, startups like GreenStitch, ZYOD, and Stylumia are leading the charge to sustainability with algorithms rather than sewing kits.
Their mission is clear: make fashion climate-smart without denting style, speed, or scale. Take a look at these startups which are leveraging AI to make fashion sustainable:
GreenStitch: Targeting carbon crisis
In 2023, GreenStitch was founded by entrepreneurs Narendra Makwana (CEO) and Arpit Samdani (CTO) in Bengaluru to tackle one of the fashion world’s biggest challenges: Scope 3 emissions. These are indirect, upstream emissions from textile manufacturing, dyeing, and international supply chains that contribute to almost 90% of a brand’s overall carbon footprint, yet remain unmeasured and unregulated. “At GreenStitch, we are bringing radical visibility to the fashion supply chain,” Narendra Makwana, co-founder and CEO, tells FE. “Up to 75% of a fashion brand’s emissions come from upstream processes like material production, dyeing, and logistics, yet these often go unmeasured.” GreenStitch employs AI to map multi-level, complex supplier networks that tend to be geographically dispersed. “Since 2023, we have enabled brands to track more than 20 million metric tonne of CO2e through these unseen phases, blind spots into data-led climate action,” Makwana adds.
The firm states that its AI engine suggests customised interventions such as changing to lower-impact materials, converting to demand-based production, streamlining shipping routes, assisting brands in lowering emissions in real time. Supported by $1.2 million in seed capital provided by Equirus InnovateX Fund, IvyCap Ventures, Zeca Ventures, and Warmup Ventures, GreenStitch is expanding globally, including in India, Southeast Asia, and Europe.
ZYOD: Curbing overproduction
Gurugram-headquartered ZYOD is fighting another side of fashion’s sustainability battle: excessive overproduction. Started in 2023 by Ankit Jaipuria and Ritesh Khandelwal, ZYOD is developing an AI-driven backend for fashion businesses globally, providing design-to-delivery solutions that are not just fast but also environmentally friendly. “Fast fashion needs a dynamic production strategy, one the traditional supply chain cannot deliver,” Jaipuria has been reported to say. “ZYOD was established in order to provide that needed quickness to fashion manufacturing.” ZYOD’s AI engine processes real-time fashion trends, past demand, and sales history to enable brands to make only what shoppers will actually purchase. Their computerised manufacturing system shortens lead time, minimises the use of resources, and facilitates lower minimum order quantities, making fashion scalable, sustainable, and economically feasible for both large-scale brands and individual designers.
Stylumia: Cutting fashion waste
Started in 2015 by former Myntra executive Ganesh Subramanian, Stylumia is a tech-first technology that takes sustainability upstream and to the design board. “We realised conventional forecasting does not address the core problem in fashion, of trend detection and forecast,” Subramanian has been reported to say. “The most waste in the fashion world is driven due to uninformed decision-making.” Stylumia applies AI and machine learning to analyse millions of real-time data points such as social media trends, consumer behaviour, and store sales to forecast what styles and stock keeping units will actually sell. It enables brands to create smarter inventories and prevent overproduction, estimated to represent up to 30% of all produced garments worldwide. Stylumia asserts that its technologies have decreased waste across the industry by more than 60 million items of clothing a year, a significant chip in fashion’s landfill issue.
Why AI is the fashion-friendly?
What ties GreenStitch, ZYOD, and Stylumia together is a conviction that action on climate needs to be grounded in data. The fashion world, which has been criticised for lack of transparency and excess consumption, is finally receiving a tech boost, one that promises transparency, accountability, and efficiency. GreenStitch says Scope 3 is not only the most difficult hurdle, but also the greatest possibility for real climate influence, further stating, “AI provides them with the means to go from estimates to acting upon actual, precise, and actionable data.” If the path of startups such as GreenStitch, ZYOD, and Stylumia is anything to go by, the future decade of fashion will be smarter, cleaner, and stronger because artificial intelligence makes it so.