ALKYMAI

Alkymai is an Italian startup founded in 2025 that merges the textile tradition of Como — the world capital of silk and high-quality fabric — with generative artificial intelligence to transform the creative process in fashion. The platform enables designers and textile companies to explore new materials, generate fabric visualisations from text descriptions, manipulate textures through conversational prompts, and preview how fabrics look on garments before physical production. The value proposition is twofold: dramatically reducing sample lead times — which in traditional textile manufacturing can take weeks — and cutting waste in the creative phase. Both are structural problems in an industry worth billions but still constrained by slow and costly production processes. Alkymai was awarded the "John McCarthy" prize during AI Week at the Rimini Convention Center, recognising ethical innovation in AI use. Its positioning fits within the broader wave of AI applied to fashion — a market attracting growing interest from international investors — with the specific focus on fabric and production rather than retail or fast fashion.